What are the specs of the system you put it in?

Have you installed the DOS drivers / config utility?

I've tried this in two different systems. The first was a Pentium 200 with 64MR RAM running Windows 95. The second is a Pentium II 450 with 512MB RAM running Windows 98. The results were the same in both systems.

Aren't those cards notorious for having extremely bad and leaky capacitors and soldering issues ?

See Trying to repair a Ensoniq Soundscape S 2000 and Ensoniq Soundscape leaking capacitors

I forgot to mention that yes, I have the DOS drivers/config utilities installed and I've tested in both Windows and booting into DOS. The results were the same no matter what.

@darry Thanks for the links. I'll take a look at those and hopefully I can get this card working.

I am unsure of how the different modes are set on those Ensoniq cards as I have never done any testing.. as in, I don't know if the modes are persistent between reboots.

It could be that it is stuck in Mt-32 mode which would definitely screw up how it sounds.

The manual does mention that it is best to run the configuration batch file for the mode you want before running a game.

Try putting it back in the Pentium 200 system and slowing the CPU speed down to 133Mhz or below. I don't think those are speed sensitive but I could be wrong.

Caps could definitely be an issue but I haven't noticed that on the S-2000 cards I have.

NickJ80 wrote on 2020-11-03, 16:37:

I was digging through my old parts bin and got pretty excited to realize that I had an early Ensoniq SoundScape that I had completely forgotten about. My excitement was quickly dashed when I placed it into one of my retro systems and tried the MIDI playback.
https://youtu.be/3zYyx587qok

The digital audio playback sounds fine. But the MIDI playback almost sounds like the sample ROM is corrupt, but I find the likelihood very low that a mask ROM would go bad out of the blue. Has anyone heard anything quite like this? Any ideas how I might fix it? Thanks in advance!

The actual samples are in the ROM on the card. The mapping from MIDI programs to sample addresses are in the firmware that gets uploaded by SSINIT. If you managed to mix up the SNDSCODE.COx files (which are for different card models with different ROMs) or the file is damaged, you may get problems like you describe even with perfectly working hardware. If you didn't already try so, re-install the drivers from a known-good copy.

@mkarcher That's very interesting. I'll certainly start with this. The idea of trying to recap this board is really daunting to say the least.