jheronimus wrote on 2024-10-20, 09:04:

Hi! […]
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Hi!

Yesterday I got my hands on a Supermicro P6SBM motherboard.

It comes with an onboard ESS Solo-1 chip that I can't detect or set up.

There doesn't seem to be a jumper on the board to enable it. The manual mentions a jumper for another board from this series (P6SBU), but not this one.

There also doesn't seem to be a BIOS setting that just says "Enable on-board audio" or I can't find one.

It doesn't show up in POST either, unless I'm missing something.

The attachment IMG_6992.jpg is no longer available

When I install a dedicated ESS Solo-1 card, it shows up as "PCI Multimedia device, Slot 3, IRQ9"

Here's what I tried so far:

- different versions of the BIOS (the board came with 3.0 that's different from 3.0 hosted at TRW). Currently running 3.1
- 3 different drivers
- tried just setting it up under DOS, it is not detected by the driver or the NSSI
- enabling "Plug and Play-aware OS" in the BIOS
- reserving several IRQs and DMAs (IRQ5, DMA1) for PCI
- running "Add new hardware" several times
- checking the sound chip for possible broken legs or something. Tbh, the whole board looks very pristine

The manual says this about installing the sound card:

The attachment Screenshot 2024-10-20 at 11.58.58.png is no longer available

So the whole procedure they're describing seems different to how I'd normally set up the sound card (using Control panel and stuff), but I don't have a Supermicro driver CD, and the only one I could find is hosted at Archive.org, so can't try it now. Supermicro's website hosted drivers on a now defunct FTP server and I can't find any mirror.

Am I missing something or is the chip simply dead somehow? I still feel like it's something about the BIOS because it has a lot of poorly described settings and is very different from both Award BIOSes and AMI BIOSes I've seen before.

The specs are:

Pentium 3 Katmai 600
2x128MB RAM
Supermicro P6SBM motherboard
Matrox G400 Max videocard
3COM 905 network card
40GB HDD

Vanilla Windows 98SE

Supermicro took their public ftp offline some time ago - try here instead https://www.supermicro.com/wdl/driver/Archive … /Old_ESS_Solo1/

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2024-10-20, 10:36:

Supermicro took their public ftp offline some time ago - try here instead https://www.supermicro.com/wdl/driver/Archive … /Old_ESS_Solo1/

Thanks, tried that. Unfortunately, both files are Audiorack 2.21 (basically a MIDI/CD player from ESS), the third one seems to be something for WinNT.

I also went through the whole ordeal of enabling ACPI by disabling APM and installing ACPI stuff in Windows, it detected a bunch of onboard components, but not the soundchip.

I guess my focus should be on getting ESS to appear in the BIOS POST table, that seems to be the root problem. I tried cleaning the chip's legs with IPA, that didn't do anything.

jheronimus wrote on 2024-10-20, 09:04:

I don't have a Supermicro driver CD, and the only one I could find is hosted at Archive.org

TRW has one. It's probably identical for all boards of that series.

elszgensa wrote on 2024-10-20, 23:16:

TRW has one. It's probably identical for all boards of that series.

Thanks so much! IA came up today, and the PC98 disc they had actually didn't have anything on my board, but this PC99 does contain all the drivers.

Unfortunately it didn't help, the sound chip still doesn't show up in the control panel.

PCI device that is invisible isn't seeing the IDSEL signal (pin 78), which is a matter of a resistor on one of the pins of the chip. Perhaps there's a cracked or missing resistor, or perhaps a bad crystal or a broken trace (since there seems to be no software enable methods available).

Tiido wrote on 2024-10-22, 06:51:

PCI device that is invisible isn't seeing the IDSEL signal (pin 78), which is a matter of a resistor on one of the pins of the chip. Perhaps there's a cracked or missing resistor, or perhaps a bad crystal or a broken trace (since there seems to be no software enable methods available).

Yeah, on closer inspection there seems to be a small, but pretty deep scratch across a few traces pretty close to the sound chip. So I guess, case closed.

Should be a relatively easy fix at least.