It's a Soundscape clone, yes 😀

The Reveal cards usually came in one of those retro CDROM kits that came with a gazillion pieces of garbage software and a sound card.

It's very similar to a real Soundscape. I wonder what that big mystery IC is in the upper right corner. That card might have tone controls..

This thing seems to have survived it's journey over the Atlantic, in one of those ubiquitous bright yellow mailer things, with about 1/4 mm of bubblewrap inside. And I paid $16 for shipping. 😒

I'm testing an old Asus 486 mobo ATM, and so I just shoved it inside and hoped for the best. After windows 98 booted up, I searched for new hardware, and it found nothing. 😕 I DL'd something from driverguide called W95b38.exe This Reveal card has "FODSWFX1000" stamped on it, and it seems to match up with some soundcard called a "sc600", which could be the same kind of card, and use the same driver package.

Anyway, inside windows 98, I manually added hardware, and pointed this setup wizard in the direction of this driver package. Two cards appeared in a list, one of which was soundscape with TONE controls. I remembered @swaaye mentioning tone controls, and so I chose that one. A reboot later, and it all seemed to work. dxdiag plays both sound effects OK (the card's own, plus the SB emulation), and the synth works too. It sounds OK, nothing special. Actually, DOOM sounds laughably bad. Some of the notes sound "off key". (Also, I tested the microsoft synthesizer thing, but it locks up the machine.)

I tested Dark Forces with soundscape options for both music and effects, and it all works, except that all sound (including *all* of my sound tests) comes from the right headphone ear only. To get both left and right headphone channels, I need to switch my headphones to mono. 🙁

Finally, I don't know where the tone controls can be adjusted, if at all. Perhaps I need to DL some software, including a mixer. I'll go back on to driverguide and have another look. Perhaps tomorrow. Incidentally, if I get hold of a mixer, maybe I can shift the "sound balance" over to the left ear! Just one last thing - looking at the photo in the O.P, look at the white CD plug thing on the top right hand side. There's a couple of them there. Look at the bottom one. Then next to that on the left is an empty jumper. I wonder if it needs to be capped, to get the stereo working correctly? Just a complete guess really. Probably a daft idea. (I need to pull out the card tomorrow and take a closer look at things.)

can we get an exquisitely high quality photo of your card? can't see anything on that original photo....

also i suggest you look through google groups. there will be posts on usenet from the card's time.

swaaye wrote:

can we get an exquisitely high quality photo of your card? can't see anything on that original photo....

Yeah, I'd love to be able to do this. My camera is really bad though. (Worse quality than the seller's photo above.) I've gotta get myself a decent camera, with a good macro mode.

Edit: I will take a photo, then label the jumpers by hand using "paint brush".

I did this in 3 parts. The photos go from right to left.

Thats pretty good quality you can even see whats printed on the ICs.

cdoublejj wrote:

Thats pretty good quality you can even see whats printed on the ICs.

Yes, it came out much better than I expected. I put the soundcard near a window to get some good light on it, and took about 8 pics of varying distances between it and the camera, and that seemed to produce a couple of useable pics. 😀

The mystery IC (TDA8421) is indeed a tone control chip, among other things. Looks like it has some of that fake "3D" spatial effect stuff too.
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/phi … ips/TDA8421.pdf

Did a quick Google Groups search for that part number and found a post about a Ensoniq driver release for Windows 3.1:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sys.pc-clo … en&dmode=source

The Soundscape firmware files SNDSCAPE.CO0 and SNDSCAPE.CO1 are now generic. This means that they can be used with all OEM versions of Ensoniq Soundscape. The impact of the generic firmware on the original OEM boards is that use of the TDA8421 tone controller chip has been disabled. This was done because of increased code space as well as to facilitate faster development.

It also looks like you do have a real Ensoniq-made patch set ROM. Same 1992 date and 2M size as my Soundscape card. So the MIDI ought to be the same.

Jumper info from Usenet:

1JP3 CD-ROM Select
2None=Disabled
31-2=Sony
43-4=Mitsumi
51-2,3-4=Matsushita/Panasonic
6
7JP4 Base Port Address
8None=350H
91-2=340H
103-4=330H
111-2,3-4 320H
12
13JP5 Wave Port Address
14None=F44H
151-2=534H
163-4=608H
171-2,3-4=E84H

Card's official name may be "Reveal Sound FX Wave 32".
http://tazbuntu.blogspot.com/2008/12/now-this … nt-history.html
http://www.yjfy.com/hardware/video/REVEAL.htm
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue16 … need_to_kno.php

@swaaye, thanks a lot for the info! 😀

I'm very pleased, because my guess about capping jumper JP1 to get stereo sound turned out to be correct! Now it's capped, the card sends out stereo sound to my headphones. But fairly typically I suppose, when you are messing about with things on an 'ad hoc' basis, I cannot be 100% certain that capping JP1 was the key to solving this problem. Because, now I have reinstalled the card (plus the "W95b38.exe drivers", which included the driver files Sndscape.so0 thru to Sndscape.so4), inside the basic windows audio mixer settings, I now see a column for "Synthesizer Balance". (You can't move this slider to the left or to the right, but you can adjust its "up and down" volume slider.)

Playing the Doom demo (ver 1.9), the music sounds a little bit silly in places. Every 5 seconds or so, the soundcard attempts to do a kind of intentional "wobbly note" effect, and it just sounds a bit daft. Other than that, it rocks! 😀

Can't you just use the drivers from the E-mu site? Those are the final 9x drivers. Also contain DOS drivers.
http://www.emu.com/support/files/download2.as … cy=0&Platform=1

Note that they're not actually from 2003. More like 1997.

Sorry, I'm being a bit stupid. I just did the most obvious follow up test. I removed the new jumper cap on JP1, restarted the machine, and the stereo sound has vanished - the sound has reverted back to mono. So, JP1 does control stereo, or rather, it forces the card to go in to mono mode. Incidentally, removing the JP2 jumper cap as well seems to remove mono sound, effectively muting the card's OUTput so you hear no sound at all.

swaaye wrote:

Can't you just use the SSIWIZ95 from the E-mu site? Those are the final 9x drivers. Also contain DOS drivers.
http://www.emu.com/support/files/download2.as … cy=0&Platform=1

Note that they're not actually from 2003. More like 1997.

Great! 😀 I'll DL them now, and give 'em a try!

Edit: Damn it, I hate making so many mistakes. I wasn't running Doom demo 1.9, but Doom demo 1.7. I just changed over to version 1.9, and that strange wobbling note effect has disappeared.