VOGONS


Reply 20 of 25, by heretic

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I had ESS Solo-1 card with no wavetable header in my DOS machine before and there was no issues with games like Doom 2, Hexen, Duke 3D. Just make sure the High DMA is different than 8 bit DMA, i always leave it set to 5 and sound just works. IIRC the driver i was using was not ESSSOLO.SYS but ESSSOLO.EXE loaded in config.sys

Reply 21 of 25, by dr.zeissler

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heretic wrote:

I had ESS Solo-1 card with no wavetable header in my DOS machine before and there was no issues with games like Doom 2, Hexen, Duke 3D. Just make sure the High DMA is different than 8 bit DMA, i always leave it set to 5 and sound just works. IIRC the driver i was using was not ESSSOLO.SYS but ESSSOLO.EXE loaded in config.sys

OK, that's interesting...this would be a BIG! thing, if that would work.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 22 of 25, by dr.zeissler

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heretic, are you really sure about that?
the only thing is a "windows executable" called "esssolo.exe" and so it does not work in plain dos.
Though using wdm-drivers in winme does lead to a working sound in duke3d, but in plain dos, duke3d does not work for me.
Can you please put a DL for the esssolo.exe ?

Thx
Doc

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 24 of 25, by gerwin

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Just a small addition to my observations with the ESS Solo-1 sound card, with a midi daughterboard attached:
Today I tried it on an Athlon XP motherboard, the Asus A7V600 with VIA KT600 Chipset, Socket A and only AGP+PCI slots. The DOS emulation works fine! Tested it with MPXplay (ESS Audiodrive driver), and also in Doom MBF 2.04 (ESS + Midi driver).
IIRC the Creative Labs/Ensoniq DOS driver failed me on this motherboard.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 25 of 25, by cde

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Kamerat wrote on 2017-09-17, 05:56:
gerwin wrote:

So I have no issues left with this card, but I don't know about the topic starter?

I think the issues boils down to the i865 chipset. For best compatibility on the ICH based Intel chipsets (i810-i875P) you need SBLINK. Unfortunately most Pentium 4 motherboard lacks that connector. VIA based motherboards are a much better option for the Solo-1, even the K8T890 PCIe chipset handles it in TDMA mode.

I can confirm the K8M890 (similar to K8T890 but for microATX) handles it in TDMA mode without issues (FM, SFX and MIDI all work in DOS). I had to solve two issues encountered with the drivers posted at https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ess-es1938s-solo-1.html (lack of ESSOLO.INI in the DOS driver and non working Win98 4.12.01.1165 driver). In this post Re: ESS 1938 under DOS I've attached drivers that work for me on the K8M890-based MSI K9VGM-V (specifically WDM 5.12.01.3047).

A small hint about finding the ES1938 on eBay: search for TTSOLO1 too, you may get more results.