Hey all,

I recently purchased a Compaq Armada 1500c laptop which sports the ES1869 sound chip. I modded it a bit to reduce the headphone out volume and added a few extra filtering capacitors to reduce noise, and it sounds great! However, I am unable to get OPL2 / OPL3 sound to work in the Windows 98 dosbox when using the ES1869 drivers (latest VxD version). I've done the requisite ESSCFG, enabling / disabling PnP, ensuring the resources are configured properly, trying different driver versions, etc. I do have a work around, which is to use the ES1868 drivers (latest VxD version), however this disables the 3D spatializer and ability to playback 48kHz sound.

I should note that this issue has been discussed a few times on this forum, with no apparent solution. Some folks claimed to have fixed it, but myself and others are unable to reproduce the fix. If someone could share a solution that is reproducible, that would be extremely appreciated:

I'm thinking this is a software issue, since the ES1868 drivers enable Win9x dos box midi support just fine. I'm a software engineer by trade and would like to figure out how or if it's possible to patch the actual ES1869 drivers to resolve this issue. I tried disassembling the drivers using Sourcer and IDA, but I really don't know where to start. I'm thinking maybe compare the ES1868 and ES1869 dissassembled code side by side and look for differences, or search for the register values that control OPL3 support...

Does anyone here have experience patching or building VxD / sound card drivers?

Maybe a separate utility could be created to properly enable OPL3 that could be run before opening the Win9x dosbox?

Maybe there's the really rare chance someone has the original source code for this driver sitting around? 😀