First post, by CoTeCiO
Hey everyone, I need some help trying to troubleshoot something.
I got recently given an old Compaq Presario motherboard (PWA-PWA-CAMARO) by a friend who found a half disassembled PC in the garbage. I managed to bring it back to life and got a nice PC, with the sole exception of OPL music. The motherboard has an ESS Allegro ES1989S sound chip. Every other aspect of the sound works fine, but I haven't been able to get any good results with OPL and I refuse to believe it is this bad.
Unfortunately the BIOS setup of this motherboard is extremely limited and doesn't offer much about the sound beyond the IRQ value. I've tried multiple drivers, I've tried the ESSDOS driver on vogonsdrivers, the 7100 and VXD7130 versions at least, I've tried running games on Windows and on DOS mode, I tried both Windows 95 and Windows 98 and I just can't seem to figure out what's wrong. I figured maybe some of you have some experience with this sort of thing. I feel the only thing to do is either find a driver that actually do things properly, or tweak a file called ESSAUDIO.INI that is created by the DOS driver, but since it's just hex data, I don't know how to work with it.
I attached a recording of Grabbag from Duke3D played through it so you can see what I mean. The audio seems to be capped at 11050 KHz, it's severely aliased and it's pitched up. This happens with every game I try and in both OPL2 and OPL3 mode. I'm not sure if this is how this chip supposed to sound like, but I hope it isn't!
Thanks!