is there the option to let the OS configure devices in your bios?
sometimes bios will display connected devices on boot does it show a multimedia device?
I had one of my ESS cards running under win95 and i think i used the driver from the vogonsdriver page.

Pickle wrote on 2021-12-04, 22:48:

is there the option to let the OS configure devices in your bios?
sometimes bios will display connected devices on boot does it show a multimedia device?
I had one of my ESS cards running under win95 and i think i used the driver from the vogonsdriver page.

Nope, it doesn´t.
BIOS says on POST "initializing plug and play cards" but then nothing shows up.
While the broken Crystal sound card gets listed as "Crystal PNP codec".
(the crystal one seems to work, but there´s no audio output on the line out)

The ESS1887f doesn´t show up but as said, when loading the drivers manually, it works partially.
It seems like there are two versions:
A plug and play card and a non plug and play card (There are two seperate 1887 drivers listed in windows)
So i guess this behavior is normal?
So probably only plug and play cards get detected automagically?

Anyways i was able to locate a driver, sadly it still has issues playing some audio files.
Many mp3 files sound like ass and some wav files throw errors
The wdm drivers from microsoft in XP are totally fine, so theoretically it should all work just fine, but win98 definitely needs non wdm drivers.

I mean i´m not planning to use this as my main mp3 player but knowing that everything works as it should is just satisfying.

So i´m probably looking for the "last" win9x driver that was released from ess technology. for this card

strange it doest show by the bios, so no jumpers on the card? (i would expect them if its not PNP). My earlier ESS card have the jumpers but thats around the 16XX line.
you might also try unisound in dos just to see if detects and sets up the card, that would also show what type it is.
i would also give the pins a good clean with qtips and alcohol. How clean is the mb itself? Is there another ISA slot you can try?
disable the parallel port for possible irq conflicts.
im not sure about WMP but maybe updating directx? (just a wild guess)

Well it´s no deal in detecting the card after loading a specific driver for the card.
The pcb is very small and only has the CD-Audio header and something that looks like a FDD/IDE header but probably is some kind of expansion port.
So i think there are no jumpers to set actually.
in DOS i used a community built ms-dos 7.1 that comes with universal drivers for all kinds of ESS audiodrive cards and actually works fine aswell (i´m also using those drivers for an ess 1878 in my compaq laptop)

Anyways nvm, i just reinstalled windows 98se, didn´t do anything but enable the microsoft wdm driver again and i don´t know how or why, it´s now perfectly fine.
It plays all my mp3`s aswell as sound blaster and cd audio in windows so i guess this is now solved 🤣...

Oh and indeed there was a conflict with the printer port but i assigned a new IRQ and that seemed to do the trick for the printer port even since i will never use it...

Well i´m quite happy atm 😀
Only if the Radeon 9000 pro would perform as it should in win9x

However, thank you for your help 😉

btw a quick overview 😀
It´s all now running fast and snappy
Now time to also reinstall windows xp for dualboot

good to hear, enjoy
does this variant have a yamaha opl or is it using esfm?

Hi!
It has esfm and microsoft software based tables
But that´s fine for me.
I don´t need 100% accurate sound as long as there is sound at all 😀