Few months ago there were still NOS available on Polish Allegro.

RayeR wrote on 2024-01-26, 15:40:

I tried again to day but now way, 2nd chip is dead. I opened dispute on Ali...

Well this happened to me too with 2 of my 10 MX29F160 chips. They normally sell used chips.
I do not know how reliable the M27V160 chips are. But I bought 4 of them and all were programmed without any issues.

moturimi1 wrote on 2024-01-26, 19:27:

Well this happened to me too with 2 of my 10 MX29F160 chips

Exactly the same error? Maybe the same seller or source. I wouldn't mind about used chips, most of used chips should be fine if there was not excessive overwriting in used application. But when the chip cannot ever return the ID there must be something terribly wrong and I guess it never worked and it was already bad during manuf. process and was selected to be scraped but someone get them and sold instead...

Paar wrote on 2024-01-26, 19:18:

Few months ago there were still NOS available on Polish Allegro.

I found there some for 15.4 zl + 25 zl for shipping thats 6,5x more than I got from Ali...

UPDATE: AliExpress claimed the refund for 1 of 2 chip. I may try order another if I'll have a luck 😀

Paar wrote on 2021-10-07, 18:40:

EDIT: Dump is fine, tested on some cards successfully.

Do you (or does anybody) have a dump of the 1M ES981? I have a card with unpopulated spots for the ES690+ROM and I'd like to compare them.

There is a dump of the file somewhere on the forum.

My dispute on Ali was successfull and I got full refund. So I ordered another pair of chips. They arrived today. Both are working but was filled with some unknown firmwares (I was not able to identify some readable strings to point out), so they was obviously recycled. Never mind, I erased them and programmed the ESS image, verify OK. So I'm satisfied for that cheap prize 😀

Great, finally you can continue with the project. Looking forward to your results.

I replaced the FlashROM on the soundcard. I then also added a wire from pins 1 and 44 (WE#, WP#) connected to 5V to prevent them floating (not on the photo). It plays well. Thank you.

Another happy customer, that's good news 😉. I'm still thinking about making a daughter board that could be connected to any ESS soundcard with wavetable header, but cannot find the time needed for that. Hopefully one day...

Paar wrote on 2024-02-15, 08:18:

I'm still thinking about making a daughter board that could be connected to any ESS soundcard with wavetable header, but cannot find the time needed for that. Hopefully one day...

well technically there's the eWave by Serdaco, even though it's got an ES692S and not the 690F

You cannot use his board with 2MB ROM as the ES692 has the 1MB integrated. The idea is to allow to use ES689F or ES690F with 2MB ROM while using sound card's integrated DAC (in ES1688/ES1868).
Such board would be inexpensive and could be made by anyone at home. The con is you would be able to use it only with ESS cards. But those are plentiful, compatible and have great FM implementation.

Hi,
I have this ESS soundcard with populated all chips, Wavetable stuff for General MIDI included, if you need to check something, measure something how it is connected or something, you can ask me. I also found a way how to disable internal midi and switch it to external wavetable connector, all you need to do is just to disconnect krystal and wavetable connector will start working and vice versa, you connect it back and internal midi is playing. I added jumper to switch between these positions. Unfortunatelly my krystal has already damaged inscription, all I see is 33 something, but it didn't work at all when I tried different one or when I tried just a little bit different, Doom sounded like Mozart instead of metal. 😁

I have one problem with this card, when internal midi is playing, there is a lot of background noise, do you know if it's possible to fix it? I tried a lot of things with no result.

I made this modification to my ESS Audiodrive card with an ES689F chip, and it worked without any problems. Be careful because the memory chips I bought from Aliexpress were used. I tested two, and one was throwing errors (it's worth buying a few). My XGecu T48 programmer requires a special adapter marked "ADP_S44_EX-1.", the universal adapter pictured earlier won't work with this programmer. I recorded the melody from the Happyland Adventures game on 1MB and 2MB memory. The difference is easy to notice. I think some instruments might sound nicer, but we have what we have 😉

BTW what's that small daughter-PCB on the right upper corner of your card?