I have a compaq armada 7800 notebook with an ESS sound card. I've had ESS boards in the past and I don't remember them sounding as bad as this one.

Could this be a driver issue? My problems start when I tried to set the midi as Sound Blaser Compatible. There is no sound. I need to set my games to Windows Sound System or something to work. (No, it's not a DMA, IRQ, or anything like that). On windows I had to use microsoft's software synthesizer as the ESS synthesizer seemed to be trying to mimic opl, but very bad, missing notes, too many problems.

Analog sound reproduction (wav) is perfect in games. I haven't tried running on pure ms-dos yet.

Does anyone know where to find drivers for windows and ms-dos?