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ESS Maestro 2e (es1978) FM Chip not found

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First post, by jgarinr

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Hello, i have a old laptop, actually a Compaq Armada m300 (P3 600mhz, 320mb ram, ATI Rage LT PRO PCI 4mb and the souncard frome the title)
I installed Win98SE and Daemon Tools for CD-Audio Games (actually for all cd games)

The drivers was download from here http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1019&menustate=0
First installed the VxD drivers, compatibilty was fine (except for win native games that doesn't play cd tracks), but there some really old DOS games that got a very poor performance, like Another World, the three Alone In The Dark (AITD3 is fully unplayable) or DOSQuake
The fact is i got FM Chip installed, so i can play any game with SoundBlaster sound (Duke3d, Doom, Wolf3d, Heretic, etc.)

Later i installed WDM drivers, there is no much change really, just the poor performance is gone, the three AITD is fully playable
All DOS games are playable with cd tracks with no issues, the win native games too (aoe2, quake 2)
The only i cant get working is the FM Chip, because its not installed, so all the games with SB sound are playable without music (Wolf3d only with pc speaker)

if i put maestro.com in the autoexec with the WDM drivers i got this

"Incorrect resource assignment"

Looking in the installation files of the WDM drivers i found this name devices

"ESS Maestro2E PCI AudioDrive (WDM)"
"ESS Maestro2E Sound Blaster Compatible (WDM)"
"ESS Maestro2E MPU-401 Compatible (WDM)"

The first one its the only listed (and installed i guess) in Device Manager

How can i get FM Chip installed for play this dos games?
Sorry for my bad languaje btw

Thanks.

Reply 1 of 4, by MAZter

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Try to run some Dos games under Dos mode without memory manager, if you want to use WDM driver for Windows.

Also may help different VXD drivers provided by Compaq:

sp12947.exe
or
sp18571.exe

Last edited by MAZter on 2019-11-13, 03:35. Edited 2 times in total.

Doom is what you want (c) MAZter

Reply 2 of 4, by LSS10999

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I don't think WDM drivers offer any support for legacy audio (SB, FM, etc.) under Windows. You need VxD drivers for these.

The MAESTRO.com is a TSR for playing games under real DOS so not sure if it's even needed on Windows.

Reply 4 of 4, by LSS10999

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jtchip wrote:

The Maestro family does not have hardware FM synthesis, the Solo-1 (ES1938/ES1946/ES1969) was the last ESS PCI sound chipset with that feature.

I know that. I think the OP might be referring to the ability to play music through 0x388h. This is present in all ESS chips regardless of family (Solo, Maestro and even Allegro), just that for the later families, there's no hardware FM anymore and it's done through a built-in wavetable in a similar manner to Ensoniq AudioPCI (Creative SB PCIxxx series before SBLive!).

EDIT: It appears the WDM driver does list a "Sound Blaster compatible" device. You might need to see if it has a "Resources" tab and check if there's an entry mentioning 0388-038B in the list. Not sure if you can change configuration profiles to look for the one that does contain 0388-038B, and use that, and make sure no entries are in conflict with others (besides IRQ, as printer ports usually occupy IRQ 5 or 7 depending on its I/O address and some legacy boards have BIOS options to allow audio cards to share its IRQ).

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