Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-23, 12:54:

Too bad about the AudioDrive functionality. Have you tested that with an older Solo-1 model and did it work there? As for the date code, I think it's K040. Here's a pic of the card if it helps:

Thanks, yes K040. That's the same code as the chip on my SL card which has a September 2000 assembly label on the back. Does your card also have an assembly date label on the back? If so can you read the year and month in red?
My older card (now sold) I did not test the Audiodrive sound in any games but the ESSVOL utility did work on the card. Which is why I'm surprised the same utility claims not to find the newer card, even though it is initialised correctly by ESSOLO.COM.

Action Replay wrote on 2022-06-23, 13:53:

Thanks, yes K040. That's the same code as the chip on my SL card which has a September 2000 assembly label on the back. Does your card also have an assembly date label on the back? If so can you read the year and month in red?

I think it's the same on mine since it says Y2K 9. Here's a picture of the back:

And if anyone else here has an older Solo-1, I'd be curious if the AudioDrive mode and native ESFM work in DOS games.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-23, 12:54:

I don't have the card installed in any of my systems at the moment, but I do plan on running some more extensive tests on it soonish. When I do, I'll check that and report back.

Please test SB-Link if you feel like it...

You might want to start with using PCISET commands for this card, because ESSOLO.COM ignores the .ini file...

But a good way to actually see if SB-Link is working is to have something playing in the background and unplug the cable while it is playing and see if it cuts off (the SFX).

mockingbird wrote on 2022-06-23, 15:13:

Please test SB-Link if you feel like it...

I have an Abit ZM6 motherboard which does have a working SB-Link header, so I can certainly test this.

But a good way to actually see if SB-Link is working is to have something playing in the background and unplug the cable while it is playing and see if it cuts off (the SFX).

I would rather not disconnect components while the system is running. Is there another way to check if SBLink is active on the Solo-1? With a Yamaha YMF744 it's very simple since the DOS driver has an option to select it.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-23, 14:14:

I think it's the same on mine since it says Y2K 9. Here's a picture of the back:

Yes that makes sense. Thank you for checking. Also, looking in the top left corner on the PCB itself there is a datecode of the PCB fab - 0036. This is year 2000, week 36 for the PCB itself being made. Then later the components are assembled onto the board and the paper label stuck on with the assembly date in red.

Looking at your photos and photos of other cards I believe the 4-digit date code on the ES1938s chips works like this:
Letter = not sure at present. I've seen D, G, H and K so far and they increase semi-linked with year so could indicate revision number.
First two digits after the letter = week number. Ranges from 01 to 52
Last digit = last digit of the year. For example 8 means 1998, 9 means 1999, 0 means 2000, 1 means 2001, etc. I've confirmed cards from 8 to 2 so far.

So K040 means week 4 of year 2000.

The question to ask everyone now is - Has revision K of the Solo-1 chip dropped AudioDrive support?

Another note on the revision code. On Phils Computer Lab web page about the ESS Solo his chip in the photos is code H170. Which if the above decoding is correct ESS were making revision H and revision K chips at the same time for part of 2000. The dates overlap. K040 means making K revision chips in week 4. H170 means making H revision chips in week 17. Quite possible with different production lines.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-23, 15:23:

I would rather not disconnect components while the system is running. Is there another way to check if SBLink is active on the Solo-1? With a Yamaha YMF744 it's very simple since the DOS driver has an option to select it.

Empirically? No. I did this with the Yamaha... The Yamaha shows SB-Link is activated but the only way I knew for sure was by unplugging the cable from the motherboard.

mockingbird wrote on 2022-06-23, 16:53:

Empirically? No. I did this with the Yamaha... The Yamaha shows SB-Link is activated but the only way I knew for sure was by unplugging the cable from the motherboard.

When using a YMF744, Duke3D running under Win9x consistently crashed unless SB-Link was connected.

Is there a game that can be similarly tested with the Solo-1? Something that crashes when TDMA or DDMA are used, but works with SB-Link?

Bought this one but didn't test it yet. Don't see a model name on it as described earlier. Saw in another forum topic it could be a Creative Labs card (MPB-000092)? But that was for version 1.10. This is a 1.1 card. So not really sure.

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-23, 17:47:

Bought this one but didn't test it yet. Don't see a model name on it as described earlier. Saw in another forum topic it could be a Creative Labs card (MPB-000092)? But that was for version 1.10. This is a 1.1 card. So not really sure.

Sound cards with part numbers starting MPB- look like they are made by Formosa (nFIC) in Taiwan. They seemed to make cards with various chips on them as OEM cards for various brands such as Genius, Trust, Diamond, Addonics.

The PCB date on your card is 1999, week 20 and the ESS chip is revision H, week 37, 1999. When you boot into DOS and initialize the card with ESSOLO.COM, does running ESSVOL.EXE let you read/set the mixer levels?

Action Replay wrote on 2022-06-24, 14:38:

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-23, 17:47:

Bought this one but didn't test it yet. Don't see a model name on it as described earlier. Saw in another forum topic it could be a Creative Labs card (MPB-000092)? But that was for version 1.10. This is a 1.1 card. So not really sure.

Sound cards with part numbers starting MPB- look like they are made by Formosa (nFIC) in Taiwan. They seemed to make cards with various chips on them as OEM cards for various brands such as Genius, Trust, Diamond, Addonics.

The PCB date on your card is 1999, week 20 and the ESS chip is revision H, week 37, 1999. When you boot into DOS and initialize the card with ESSOLO.COM, does running ESSVOL.EXE let you read/set the mixer levels?

Will install the card later today and let you know. What should running ESSVOL.EXE tell us?

Action Replay wrote on 2022-06-23, 12:37:

If you boot directly to DOS and run ESSOLO.COM (or load it in autoexec.bat) can you then run ESSVOL.EXE to set the mixer or does it say that it cannot find the Audiodrive?

I just tested this and I'm getting the "cannot find Audiodrive" behavior:

Also, I've connected SB-Link to the motherboard header (which works just fine with a YMF744) but if the output of ESSOLO.COM is any indication, it seems to be using DDMA.

mockingbird wrote on 2022-06-23, 15:13:

Please test SB-Link if you feel like it...

I think I've got it working now:

The driver defaults to DDMA but I found how to change it to SB-Link in this thread. I followed the instructions there and used a hex editor on ESSOLO.INI to force SB-Link. However, running ESSOLO.COM always reverted my changes to ESSOLO.INI. The solution: I made ESSOLO.INI read-only after editing it to my liking. 😁 This seems to work, as far as I can tell. I've tested the usual suspects like Doom, Duke3D and Prince of Persia and they all worked fine. I'm attaching my edited ESSOLO.INI and the accompanying ESSOLO.COM and ESSOLO.SYS in case they might be useful for someone else. For reference, these files were installed by the 4.12.01.1165 driver:

I'm not sure where I got that driver archive, but I can upload that too if someone needs it.

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-24, 14:43:

Will install the card later today and let you know. What should running ESSVOL.EXE tell us?

It seems to indicate whether your revision of the Solo-1 chip supports AudioDrive emulation. It will either say "Cannot find the AudioDrive." or it will let you read/set the mixer volume levels. I am interested to know how your H revision chip behaves!!

Thanks for testing the ESSVOL.EXE Joseph. That is the same result as I get on my K-revision Solo-1 chip, the same as your K040 stamped one.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-24, 15:40:

I followed the instructions there and used a hex editor on ESSOLO.INI to force SB-Link. However, running ESSOLO.COM always reverted my changes to ESSOLO.INI. The solution: I made ESSOLO.INI read-only after editing it to my liking. 😁 This seems to work, as far as I can tell. I've tested the usual suspects like Doom, Duke3D and Prince of Persia and they all worked fine. I'm attaching my edited ESSOLO.INI and the accompanying ESSOLO.COM and ESSOLO.SYS in case they might be useful for someone else. For reference, these files were installed by the 4.12.01.1165 driver:

You might find that it is Windows that is overwriting the INI file. Every time I booted Win98 the ESSOLO.INI gets overwritten. I have the registry entries that need to be changed to stop this happening if anyone is interested.

I'm not sure where I got that driver archive, but I can upload that too if someone needs it.

The 4.12.01.1165 archive is available on Philscomputerlab website.

Action Replay wrote on 2022-06-24, 17:43:

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-24, 14:43:

Will install the card later today and let you know. What should running ESSVOL.EXE tell us?

It seems to indicate whether your revision of the Solo-1 chip supports AudioDrive emulation. It will either say "Cannot find the AudioDrive." or it will let you read/set the mixer volume levels. I am interested to know how your H revision chip behaves!!

Installed the card on a nForce2 board and get the "Cannot find the AudioDrive." message. Can't say I am to excited about the card. Needed to hex edit ESSOLO.INI to enable the joystick port and Wolfenstein 3D doesn't recognize a SB card. So can only select PC speaker. Also can't change TDMA to DDMA to check if this works with the game. Made ESSOLO.INI read-only after the hex edit to DDMA but whatever I do it always uses TDMA. 🙁 Card is using I5 and D1 which are not used and ESSOLO.COM is running correctly. So don't know what's going on.

Action Replay wrote on 2022-06-24, 17:50:

You might find that it is Windows that is overwriting the INI file. Every time I booted Win98 the ESSOLO.INI gets overwritten. I have the registry entries that need to be changed to stop this happening if anyone is interested.

Those registry tweaks would be nice to have, feel free to share.

I also noticed that my AUTOEXEC.BAT and DOSSTART.BAT get overwritten if I place a custom SET BLASTER entry there. Would be great if that could be avoided as well.

I decided to try this Terratec Solo1 driver CD to see if it would make any difference with regards to ESSVOL.EXE not detecting the card. No dice, it still fails with the same message. However, these drivers do come with a software wavetable:

The 3 MB sample set sounds pretty decent, but I couldn't get it to work with DOS games which use General MIDI music. I have set it as the default device under Control Panel > Multimedia > MIDI but that didn't help. The software wavetable works fine when playing .mid files through Windows Media Player, but DOS games can't seem to access it at port 330.

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-24, 18:07:

Installed the card on a nForce2 board and get the "Cannot find the AudioDrive." message. Can't say I am to excited about the card. Needed to hex edit ESSOLO.INI to enable the joystick port and Wolfenstein 3D doesn't recognize a SB card. So can only select PC speaker. Also can't change TDMA to DDMA to check if this works with the game. Made ESSOLO.INI read-only after the hex edit to DDMA but whatever I do it always uses TDMA. 🙁 Card is using I5 and D1 which are not used and ESSOLO.COM is running correctly. So don't know what's going on.

nForce2 is your problem, you can't access the legacy ports needed for Sound Blaster over the PCI bus. For the Solo-1 I would stick with a VIA based motherboard.

Kamerat wrote on 2022-06-26, 09:44:

Yoghoo wrote on 2022-06-24, 18:07:

Installed the card on a nForce2 board and get the "Cannot find the AudioDrive." message. Can't say I am to excited about the card. Needed to hex edit ESSOLO.INI to enable the joystick port and Wolfenstein 3D doesn't recognize a SB card. So can only select PC speaker. Also can't change TDMA to DDMA to check if this works with the game. Made ESSOLO.INI read-only after the hex edit to DDMA but whatever I do it always uses TDMA. 🙁 Card is using I5 and D1 which are not used and ESSOLO.COM is running correctly. So don't know what's going on.

nForce2 is your problem, you can't access the legacy ports needed for Sound Blaster over the PCI bus. For the Solo-1 I would stick with a VIA based motherboard.

Indeed. Found that out later. Also tried an Avance Logic ALS4000 but with the same result. Not a big problem fortunately as I use the Shuttle SN41G2 (with nForce2) for Windows ME so didn't really need a DOS card but was curious. 😀