HunterZ wrote:

My Creative SB PCI128 was re-branded Ensoniq hardware, and it definitely had EAX and 3D sound support of some kind - but that may have been implemented by Creative in their version of the drivers.

Yup Creative implemented EAX and A3D. You can get these even on the original Ensoniq AudioPCI card because Creative + Ensoniq released a driver update that turned it into Sound Blaster PCI 64.

There was once a Unofficial AudioPCI website that covered all of the developments. Sadly it is not available in the Internet Archive.

Hornpipe2 wrote:

the data sheet has this funny line about the bits used to move the joystick to another address: "These two bits are dedicated to Dave Sowa

That is HILARIOUS. I've read a lot of datasheets in my day and have never seen that. I must know more. I found the guy online, I think I'll eventually shoot him an email 😀

Jorpho wrote:

Hornpipe2 wrote:

Communications Interface
Telephone Answering Device (TAD) Interface
• Telephone Answering Device for modem connection. Allows a single microphone and stereo speaker set to be used for both voice modem and sound card audio applications (message recording and playback, speakerphone, etc.) Links your modem to a header on the soundcard, such that you can use one of those dialer programs to use the modem like a phone handset.

...Wow, really?

Is this a common thing on sound cards? I've not heard of this before, and yet it's exactly the sort of thing I've been pining for. Does it really work? (Should I take this to another thread?)

This was INCREDIBLY common in late 90's cards: "use your computer as a speakerphone!" IIRC it uses the same 4-wire analog audio cable that CD drives used. Where you been man? 😀

Does it only work with particular modems?

Further investigations. This archived Usenet thread from 1997 (if you can ignore the flamewar!) confirms: practically everything about the AudioPCI is really handled by the host PC. Think WinModems, for the sound card world. The whole thing boils down to a 2xDAC 1xADC on a PCI card with an AC'97 codec, UART/gameport, and a handful of other features.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/co … w8/YFt4ipE97kEJ

This provides a new understanding of the Legacy (SB / AdLib / MT-32 / etc emulation) block on the chip. It is designed to respond to events on the specified ports, but merely forwards back to the driver whatever the request was. Better than a TSR, it seems, because it's implemented on the PCI bus directly and looks just like real hardware to whatever program is calling it. The driver contains a MIDI softsynth which handles MT-32 (and AdLib...?), shunting the raw PCM stream to the output mixer along with any other PCM data (SB, WSS, etc).

Further thoughts follow...

In this regard, then, the ALSA driver for es1370 / 1371 is actually rather feature-complete. Only a few more card features remain untapped in the driver code:
* More granular power-saving features (certain items - Joystick, UART, serial, PCI crystal, AC'97 CODEC - can be turned off individually to conserve energy). The current driver appears to support only shutting down the AC'97 chip when going into suspend mode.
* Legacy block support (but this would serve absolutely no purpose, because no sane *nix app would directly bang the SB IO ports instead of talking to /dev/sequencer or whatever)

What about that MIDI softsynth, and the ecw files? Fortunately, someone has already reverse-engineered the format and pulled out the data. Unfortunately, it does not exactly fit into SF2 soundfont format and some data is lost in the conversion. One interesting project might be to find a suitable container which is supported by TiMidity (or comparable existing softsynth), and unpack the various samples there, which would bring us full-circle to emulating AudioPCI MIDI sound in any modern OS.

Where does that leave DOS users? The Legacy block forwards requests back to the driver. A new community driver could conceivably be developed, which brings in all the nice tech of the last X years... things like a *real* OPL-3 emulator from AdPlug, a better MIDI softsynth or a more configurable one (route MIDI out the joystick port instead), etc etc. These cards could thus conceivably become some of the best DOS soundcards, if the CPU was up to scratch to actually do the sound processing, because 48khz quadraphonic sound with a 90dB noise floor in a ubiquitous PnP PCI form factor is not a bad platform to start from...

There are technical datasheets for the ES1371 and ES1370. You can read it all there too. The ES1370 datasheet is a word processor document instead of a PDF and I'm not sure where to find it at the moment...

An unfortunate/interesting aspect to ES1370 is it can't playback 48kHz properly. It is a 11/22/44kHz chip without any sample rate conversion (I think the datasheet shows that). 48kHz plays out of pitch. Not so great for movies! ES1371 and ES1373 address this by adding SRC and by being 48kHz native. But of course 11/22/44kHz native has its advantages over SRC.

And here is the motherload of disappointing Ensoniq Concert Wavetable format info, which illuminates why a 2MB Soundscape can blow away the 8MB .ecw.
http://johnengelmann.net/technology/ecw/

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

If anyone manages to get the MIDI interface (joystick port) going under DOS please let us know because it supports Intelligent mode in the same way like all Ensoniq cards.

Have you tested the intelligent mode support on an Ensoniq card? I know it's supposed to, but Gateway still won't work when using a Soundscape / MT-32 for example.

Gateway, other IRQ probing games / hard cases do not work. But the main ones from Sierra and Origin work fine!

OK thanks that's good to know!

swaaye wrote:

There are technical datasheets for the ES1371 and ES1370. You can read it all there too. The ES1370 datasheet is a word processor document instead of a PDF and I'm not sure where to find it at the moment...

It's around. Here's a conversion to PDF I made. The ES1373 datasheet is also readily available. However, I'm sure Hornpipe2 is well aware of these...

I hope this is not the wrong place to post this, but this seems to be the main source of information about this sound card. It took me a good bit to get this to work, so hopefully this helps someone.

Picked up an older PC from a thrift store that used the Intel 810 chipset. I wanted a bit more than the onboard audio so I picked up an AudioPCI. Unfortunately it did not work correctly out of the box. The Ensoniq Windows drivers worked, but the dos drivers did not. In Dos the Ensoniq drivers reported that the sound card could not initialize. Oddly, it worked just fine running Dos games within Windows 98. I tried some updated Creative drivers, which oddly worked in Dos but locked up in Windows.

The solution was in the bios. It is an HP desktop, so the BIOS options are probably not standard. There was an option in the bios for Installed OS, which I believe is actually this motherboards PnP setting. Changing this from W98 to Other, which I believe is basically turning PnP support off, immediately fixed my problems. The card is now working perfectly in both Windows and Dos.

So if you are having problems getting this card to work in Dos, try turning off PnP support in the bios.

It works in SB Pro mode for SFX and FM, Adlib, General Midi with and without MT-32 mode, and Ensoniq Soundscape mode. Outside the FM quality I am quite happy with it.

jxhicks wrote:

I hope this is not the wrong place to post this, but this seems to be the main source of information about this sound card. It took me a good bit to get this to work, so hopefully this helps someone.

Thanks for sharing!

Oddly, it worked just fine running Dos games within Windows 98. I tried some updated Creative drivers, which oddly worked in Dos but locked up in Windows.

The Windows drivers are probably providing some kind of emulation/bridge for DOS programs to use.

So if you are having problems getting this card to work in Dos, try turning off PnP support in the bios.

This used to be common wisdom for running DOS stuff in the Win9x era. I hadn't heard of that "Installed OS" BIOS option though, so that's good to know about.

There are also Creative remarked chips:
CT5507 = ES1370
CT2518 = ES1371
CT5880 = ?

I have an old PCI soundcard, it's a Creative Soundblaster PCI128 (CT4700). According to my research in Internet, it shall comes with the Ensoniq ES1370 chip.

Well, previously i've planned to use this card on a Win95/DOS7.0 Retro PC, which has 1AGP slots, 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots.
Several day's ago, i've seen also the project from Phil about building a General Midi Box with MUNT (see Roland MT-32, CM-32L + General MIDI for $50 Building a MIDI box).
He has also created this huge video, over three hours long and all about Roland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLvsaJ4h-VY).

After i read on wiki and here in this thread, that the FM-sound (OPL-FM) is really crazy, i thought maybe building a MIDI box (with Roland MT-32, CM-32L and General MIDI compatibility) can solve this problem.

But Phil recommends in his thread a ISA soundcard with MPU401 MIDI interface, and in his youtube video he say's that every simple soundcard with MPU401 UART interface is possible.
These PCI card have all of them this interface, or not? A manual on creative's homepage show definitely the data on p.29 (http://ccftp.creative.com/manualdn/Manuals/TS … AudioPCI128.pdf)

The question for me is now: concerning compatibility in DOS mode, is that PCI card enough with an additional selfmade MIDI-Box with a USB-Midi-Adapter & MUNT (like the box in Phil's video)?
Well, even on wiki is the info about a number of DOS games which fails for this DOS legacy mode. Are there really a lot or only quite few games which are incompatible.

I have also a ISA card, it's named as ASOUND Gold (nearly equvivalent to Avance Logic ALS100 Plus+ PnP), but my origin plan was to sell the card. The only information i've got in internet is: that it has a soundblaster 16 compatibility, and a OPL2/3 compatibility which is quite away from the original yamaha sound. The port of the data cable is named as Game/Midi port and this is also a fully MPU401 UART interface, isn't?

What do you think? It's better to use the PCI card or the ISA card which was not planned to use, or instead to buy an older ISA soundblaster?

If I recall correctly the AudioPCI's DOS drivers (if they are like Live!'s) emulates an MPU-401 interface and routes it to its internal synth, and there is no way to route it to the actual external MIDI interface.

The ISA card should work. I'm just not sure that ALS100 card will have clean sound or a decent FM synth.

You'll almost certainly have less compatibility problems with an ISA card. The DOS drivers for PCI sound cards are very complex and AudioPCI requires EMM386 loaded.

Ok, alright! When i wanna have less problems then i should go better with ISA as i understand. I have one further question.

Considering the different soundblaster generations, not every is MIDI MPU-401 (UART) compatible, right? On wiki it's mentioned that this function comes first with soundblaster 16. Then a lot of variant SB16 has the 'famous - hanging note bug' - the DSP 4.06 to 4.13 (except the CT1740 & CT1750 with DSP 4.05). This is also effective for the SB32 and SB AWE32, right? As i understand the AWE64 has the new DSP 4.16 is working.

When i summarize, regarding the four soundblaster generations with ISA slots:
1. generation: Sound Blaster 1.0, Sound Blaster 1.5, Sound Blaster 2.0
2. generation: Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster Pro 2
3. generation: Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster ViBRA16
4. generation: Sound Blaster AWE32, Sound Blaster 32, Sound Blaster AWE64

Is it's true that only two version of SB16 and the AWE64 are HNB- bugfree? Or is there maybe some other models out there? I guess the cheap ALS100+ should be fine, and the only point is, if the SB-sound effect is ok...i don't know.

I tried connecting the MIDI Out pin of one Sound Blaster (SB 2.0 or maybe SB16) to the MIDI In pin of my SB PCI128 (or maybe it was the other way around?) and then using something like MIDI Ox / MIDI Yoke to loop it around to the wavetable synthesizer of the SB PCI128. It didn't work very well; probably some circuitry is needed in between.

Here is some info on the differences between SB MIDI ports and real MIDI ports: http://www.amsky.com/~cirkuit/hacker/sb2midi.html

melbar wrote:

Ok, alright! When i wanna have less problems then i should go better with ISA as i understand. I have one further question. […]
Show full quote

Ok, alright! When i wanna have less problems then i should go better with ISA as i understand. I have one further question.

Considering the different soundblaster generations, not every is MIDI MPU-401 (UART) compatible, right? On wiki it's mentioned that this function comes first with soundblaster 16. Then a lot of variant SB16 has the 'famous - hanging note bug' - the DSP 4.06 to 4.13 (except the CT1740 & CT1750 with DSP 4.05). This is also effective for the SB32 and SB AWE32, right? As i understand the AWE64 has the new DSP 4.16 is working.

When i summarize, regarding the four soundblaster generations with ISA slots:
1. generation: Sound Blaster 1.0, Sound Blaster 1.5, Sound Blaster 2.0
2. generation: Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster Pro 2
3. generation: Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster ViBRA16
4. generation: Sound Blaster AWE32, Sound Blaster 32, Sound Blaster AWE64

The fully integrated Vibra cards also usually have DSP 4.16.

melbar wrote:

Is it's true that only two version of SB16 and the AWE64 are HNB- bugfree? Or is there maybe some other models out there? I guess the cheap ALS100+ should be fine, and the only point is, if the SB-sound effect is ok...i don't know.

Well, it's Creative, so there's quite a few variants that fit the criteria.

One thing to keep in mind. This lowly sound card is why Creative bought Ensoniq. They really wanted the DOS compatibility software, but they landed up recycling the AudioPCI board quite a bit in the OEM channel too.