VOGONS


First post, by GabrielKnight123

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Hi all, I have two ESS AudioDrive sound cards that are working well except that when I change the volume it goes back to really loud no matter how many times I save the changes or redo im using the "speaker out" for head phones so not the line out and im using the sound cards in Dos 6.21 with the driver from the Vogons driver library "ES688 Audiodrive Full install for Dos", I tried many different drivers but they first off dont detect the card as the driver type. My cards have two ESS AudioDrive chips and the driver made a folder on C: called "ESSUTIL" but I installed the drivers from a directory I made called "688full" and both directories have these files:

ES968.COM
ESSCFG.EXE
ESSCFG.INI
ESSVOL.EXE
SETUP.EXE
SETVOL.EXE

Running one setvol.exe from either dir will update the Autoexec.bat with the new vol settings and rem the other out so I tried clearing the rem and had all the vol settings present and I get an error message:

"C:\>C:\ESSUTIL\SETVOL /XV:03 /XL:00 /XW:03 /XM:00 /XC:00 /XS:03 /XA:00
ES1688+968 PnP Sound Card not present or ES968.COM not installed"

C:\>C:\688full\setvol /XV:03 /XL:00 /XW:03 /XM:00 /XC:00 /XS:03 /XA:00
ES1688+968 PnP Sound Card not present or ES968.COM not installed

I have the file ES968.com but I dont know how to load it in either the autoexec.bat or the config.sys do I use "DEVICEHIGH=C:\688full\ES968.com" in autoexec.bat or something else? If this file ES968.COM does not fix the volume problem is there something else to try?

Reply 2 of 10, by GabrielKnight123

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I looked in my config.sys and it has an entry that uses ES968.com with parameters, I have tried the following ESS chipped cards:

ES1868F
ES1869FC
ES1688F + ES968F
ES1688F
ES688FC + ES968F

They all dont keep the vol settings if I set them using essvol.exe /V:2 /W:2 etc as soon as I load a dos game it goes back to /V:8 /W:8 etc the drivers im using from Vogons DL im using the correct ones not just the ones from the DOS directory. Would it have anything to do with the SIS 5582 chipset on the motherboard?

Reply 3 of 10, by GabrielKnight123

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All the cards except for the ES1688 card used the same Dos drivers but the ES1688 had its own same set of files but were probably different in some way. I used the "ES688 Audiodrive Full install for Dos" driver from Vogons DL for one or two cards which I cant remember at the moment and this driver has an extra file the one called ES968.COM.

Reply 4 of 10, by AllTinker

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GabrielKnight123 wrote:

All the cards except for the ES1688 card used the same Dos drivers but the ES1688 had its own same set of files but were probably different in some way.

Hmmn, the files I've used for the ES1868 and ES1869 were also different and took different parameters, e.g. for DMA. With the ES186x cards at least the .COM is apparently purely for the IDE CD-ROM interface - I don't use it myself. Looks like there's no choice for the ES968 though if it handles the PnP side of things too.

I'm using these at the moment for my ES1869F which holds its volume settings fine in DOS.

On the ES1869 at least ESSVOL /w (wave) is for the wavetable option, not digital audio, so my AUTOEXEC.BAT lines are:

C:\DRIVERS\AUDIODRV\ESSCFG.EXE /V:1 /I:5 /D:1 /E:3 /A:220 /B:330 /J:E
C:\DRIVERS\AUDIODRV\ESSVOL.EXE /v:15 /l:0 /w:0 /m:0 /c:15 /s:15 /a:0 /p:0

I set master, CD-Audio and synth (FM) to max and zero everything else.

Just now I tried running ESSVOL /v:2 /c:2 /s:2, ran Duke 3D and they were still set that way afterwards. Anyway good luck!

Reply 5 of 10, by GabrielKnight123

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I found out part of a solution, every game I tried so far works and does not change the volume settings....but Gabriel Knight 1 is the only game I have so far that changes the volume so straight away when I get into the game I have to reduce the music and voice down to the last bar but the voice is still quite loud. GK1 uses Dos4GW can this have something to do with it?

Reply 6 of 10, by derSammler

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Actually, many games mess with the volume. I have the same problem with many DOS games on my 486. DOOM for example raises the volume to 14. It's probably bad coding that games that uses the hardware mixer of the sound card for volume do not reset the values on exit.

Reply 7 of 10, by Jo22

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Thanks for that info! I wonder if there's a technical reason behind that bad coding. Someone should tink that the volume settings are readable.
If that's the case, the game could read the original volume settings during start up and restore them during exit.

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Reply 8 of 10, by derSammler

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Just an assumption, of course. Could also be that ESS chipsets do not allow reading the values. But I noticed that behaviour with cards based on ES1688, ES1868, and also ALS100+. Never checked what a real Sound Blaster does. While I have many Sound Blaster cards, I'm currently not using any of them. 😁

Reply 10 of 10, by Pierre32

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Xmodule999 wrote on 2022-03-17, 15:31:

Version 2.8 is the highest version of ES968.COM driver?

I can't answer this. But if you're having issues configuring one of these cards, given that the ES968 is a PnP chip, Unisound is worth a look these days:

UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b