this is possibly more of a windows question than specifically for the es1978, which is my first experience with a soundcard on the pci bus. i'm running a compaq armada e500 laptop with a 440bx chipset. i have the windows es1978 vxd drivers installed which is weirdly a requirement for pure dos operation as the vxd drivers are responsible for writing to the mstrinf.ini config file which is in machine code. in any case, the maestro.com tsr successfully executes and reports the card is initialized in ddma mode. so it works in pure dos, but something is majorly off with the fm synthesis.

the windows drivers install a software wavetable midi synth with a 2 or 4mb soundbank so i thought i'd try to get that working in a dos virtual machine instead. i've listened to the wavetable synth using dxdiag, either selecting it directly or using the midi mapper, so it should be functional. under device manager there are dos/fm synthesis, soft synth and mpu-401 sub-devices. the dos/fm synthesis device lists 0x240,0x388, irq 5 and dma 1 resources; mpu-401 uses 0x340; however, the soft synth device has no resources tab at all (only settings to select 2 or 4mb soundbank).

so my problem is when i try to play a game in a win98se dos window and select gm midi i get no sound. shouldn't the dos window automatically intercept any midi music and pipe it to the system midi mapper? is there something else that needs to happen? is the 0x340 address being mistakenly used which i can tell from dxdiag is obviously the input/output midi port for an external module?