I stumbled upon this sound card while trying to buy a CD-ROM drive. This was on the other end of the CD-ROM drive I was after. Seems to be not very common, so turning to your help in looking for DOS drivers for this thing. I do have the 5,25" driver disks but unfortunately I don't have a 5,25" floppy drive to read them...
Already found the drivers for another variant of this from mpoli.fi - unfortunately those didn't work.
Thank you, I’ll give that a try. Funny enough, the card on cover of the box looks exactly like a PAS16 to me. Or at least the card itself looks completely different from the one on the box, and not just the color of the card but it has two extra CD-ROM connectors and an extra 3.5mm jack (mic in has R and L mono jacks). First I thought this is not the actual LaserWave 16 card that was in the box, but the seller swears this is the card that was in this box when new, and that it cost him about 1500 FIM in 1993 which is 400-450 euros adjusted for inflation. Other thing I can think of is the design of the box art used some stock photo of PAS16 instead of their clone of PAS16 on the box, which would be quite weird. Though they did put Sound Blaster on top of compatibility list too, which is a bit weird choice but then again maybe they knew this isn’t going to sell without trying to make it look like the real thing and emphasizing SB compatibility, or something. Who knows. Unfortunately the seller had misplaced the manual, he’s still looking around, so fingers crossed there will be more information about this card.
Anyway, I’ll try the PAS16 drivers later after work and also asked if I may just scrape the original hard drive for the drivers, so there’s plenty of hope to make this thing put out some sound. And get the non-IDE CD-ROM drive working which was what I was after in the first place..
Also, I want to take a moment to appreciate the design choice to put a lone OPL3 chip dead center on the back of the card. I don’t think I’ve seen that before, have I just been blind?
Well, the PAS16 drivers kind of half-work. The installation is successful and the card seems to sometimes work within the installer. Very unstable though. Continuing to hunt for the correct drivers...
the connectors appear to be scsi, sony, and mitsumi. and unfortunately since normal pas 16 seems to be scsi only, the drivers might actually be needed to make those two work.
so if you have a sony or mitsumi interface on the cd-rom, you are probably out of luck with the pas 16 drivers.
Yeah it’s Matsushita or something in that general direction, connects to the 40-pin header and has the device 0-3 jumper instead of master/slave/cs jumper. I forget the model number, but it should be 2X speed though. Definitely did not work, tried a couple different drivers for it too, but after none of them showed any life signs, now I think the LaserWave needs to get fully going before the CD-ROM connector on it can be a thing.
Last edited by MrFiveThumbs on 2024-08-25, 06:53. Edited 1 time in total.
Well, the PAS16 drivers kind of half-work. The installation is successful and the card seems to sometimes work within the installer. Very unstable though. Continuing to hunt for the correct drivers...
Thanks, I'll give that a go. I also got two 5,25" drives from eBay, with any luck I can get at least one of those working so I can get to the original drivers... It'll take a while to get the drives though, so I might as well play around with the PAS drivers some more.
Well, same problems with the studio version drivers - nothing works, except every now and then I'm able to hear some test sounds in the installer. More often there's nothing, and if it happens to work, then it just stops working a few seconds later.
Maybe it's a card that requires -5v, what kind of power supply you are using?
Also pictures don't show any jumpers, do you have manual for the card? Maybe it needs some jumppers set.
Good points to check, thank you! It's an old IBM PS/ValuePoint 486SX, and I just looked in there and it looks to me like a normal AT power supply. At least the connectors look like normal, and there's a thick wire leading to a clicky on/off -switch. This is from 1993. I would expect it to have the -5V.
No manual for the sound card yet, the seller is still looking around if he can find it somewhere. It was just pulled out of his old 486 so I doubt there were any jumpers on it.
Well, this is turning hopeless. Of the 3 floppies, only disk 2 was OK. Disk 1 has error on one file (which turned out to be very necessary, unfortunately) and disk 3 was very bad with multiple errors. This puts the LaserWave 16 back to the box and on the shelf, waiting for a miracle to occur.
That miracle might realize as one of following:
- original owner finds the 3,5" disks and they happen to work
- somebody here pulls the drivers out of void into existence
- the drivers magically appear to the internet somehow
Pending any of above, this is pretty much it. I'll give it another go later this weekend, but I'm not holding breath for any other outcome than more errors with the disks.
Have been following this with interest, as it looks like a unique clone card, and had fingers crossed you'd get the disks working, sorry to hear it hasn't worked so far.
Do you have the directory listing for the working disks? What seemed unusual from the disks is the copyright date of 1991, which even if it turns out to be a meaningless number, pre-dates the PAS16 - the directory listings would therefore be interesting. If it's a bespoke driver set you may be out of luck though.
There is a brief review of the card from April 1993 - https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/laserwave-16/5481 - which states, perhaps erroneously, that the card is a PAS clone, but then the board doesn't look much like a PAS. It does mention the 400-page manual though, so the former owner should be looking for quite a chunky volume.
I can see the directory listings of all 3 disks, but I'm getting data errors reading the files.
On disk 1 the broken file is the programs.lzh, and the setup process complains about missing file. If I continue the install process nonetheless, it keeps complaining about multiple missing files (which I assume would have been inside the missing lharc compressed file). After the install is complete, it's missing the actual driver file added to config.sys, as well as another executable added to autoexec.bat. The install process also fails to produce any sound whatsoever.
File listings of the floppies:
Disk 1:
1 Volume in drive B is unlabeled Serial number is 2A20:12F0 2 Directory of b:\*.* 3 4chord.wav 57630 14.08.91 0.00 5dosshell.ini 18943 10.12.92 3.50 6filelist.txt 1237 7.01.93 14.10 7install.exe 42847 24.11.92 15.19 8laser.wav 17362 14.08.91 0.00 9lharc.exe 31256 31.07.89 0.05 10midi.lzh 110105 23.03.92 13.15 11mod.lzh 509104 6.05.92 20.54 12mvinst.inf 6507 5.12.92 8.28 13play.exe 39926 24.07.92 1.42 14programs.lzh 345957 7.01.93 13.58 15 1 180 874 bytes in 11 files and 0 dirs 1 183 232 bytes allocated 16 28 160 bytes free
Disk 2:
1 2 Volume in drive B is unlabeled Serial number is 2337:12F6 3 Directory of b:\*.* 4 5sfx.lzh 274400 6.05.92 23.08 6speech.lzh 899018 23.03.92 3.02 7 1 173 418 bytes in 2 files and 0 dirs 1 173 504 bytes allocated 8 40 448 bytes free
Files I was able to salvage from the disks are attached.
Whoever downloads these, please keep in mind these are not working, and not all files are here. Install fails on DOS and setup fails on Windows 3.11. These are attached only for purpose of maybe someone figuring out something useful out of them, please don't think that these will work if someone in the future is looking for working drivers for this card. These are not it, these are broken.
Last edited by MrFiveThumbs on 2024-08-25, 06:52. Edited 1 time in total.
