Silent Loon wrote:

Looks like one, I would guess, but swaaye might be able to confirm that:

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& … e=STRK:MEWAX:IT

A prowed owner of two of them here can confirm it's an "Elite" 😀

Amigaz wrote:

A prowed owner of two of them here can confirm it's an "Elite" 😀

😮 We let the proud owner give the verdict, though I already know what he is gonna say. 🙄
Oh wait you don't mean mr ensoniq (swaaye), but that you yourself have two of them.

Yeah that definitely is an Elite.

It went for E 10,50. I drove up the price just a little 😉 But as I already decided I don't have any real use for it, I don't mind someone else preserving it for the years to come.

This website has a small preview of the Elite's synth. output.
WaveTable & OPL4 Music Generation

The significant differences between the Elite and the plain Soundscape cards are 1) patch set 2) ESP DB 3) IDE port. There's also an Elite w/o the ESP that was sold as Soundscape II apparently. Just look at my pic above which is an Elite next to the original SS. They are very similar. These cards have rather clear output compared to their competitors. The solid caps were not popular back then and stick out on these cards.

The instruments in the patch sets are quite different. They are both 2MB. The newer set isn't clearly superior, it's just different. The percussion section is notably changed, with the Elite being punchier/louder. And the effects processor makes it all sound a little more natural.

Well it finally showed up! 🤣

I had to compress the photo a lot to get it to be a valid Vogons attachment. Consequently, my comments seem to have got a bit squashed. So, that info is -

PARTNO: 4001027201 REV B ASSYNO: 40900272 "02" REV "F" FCC ID: LF7SS2016

Serial No (white sticker) S2016-II-B 9517

Also on the photo, the 4 red lines are -

9508

ENSONIQ OTTOR2

ANALOG DEVICES AD1848KP

ENSONIQ SEQUOIA DEV GRP

I have no idea if it works. It's only just arrived. I'm currently battling with unholy demons (VIA 4-in-1 chipset driver), and so I would greatly appreciate any "quick install" tips to get this ancient thing playing Dark Forces tunes + blaster fire. 😀

What a beauty 😀

Here's the drivers I use
download.php?id=5205

Kindly provided by swaaye, they got me started when I got my first ensoniq card

Amigaz wrote:

What a beauty :) […]
Show full quote

What a beauty 😀

Here's the drivers I use
download.php?id=5205

Kindly provided by swaaye, they got me started when I got my first ensoniq card

Thanks a lot, but when I click on that link, I get this Vogons error message -

"Sorry but you are not authorized to view or download this Attachment"

retro games 100 wrote:

Amigaz wrote:

What a beauty :) […]
Show full quote

What a beauty 😀

Here's the drivers I use
download.php?id=5205

Kindly provided by swaaye, they got me started when I got my first ensoniq card

Thanks a lot, but when I click on that link, I get this Vogons error message -

"Sorry but you are not authorized to view or download this Attachment"

doh, it's because they're in a PM...silly me

I've atached the archive at the bottom of this post

Cheers ears! 😀

The Ensoniq thread in my sig has even more stuff for those cards. 😀

fyi the driver support is almost exclusively DOS, Win3.x or Win9x. NT is barely supported.

Wow! I just got it working. 😀 I'm sure there was something amiss with my previous Ensoniq soundcard (a "Reveal clone"), because this one sounds very good! My current DOS set up is very limited ATM, and I've only had a chance to try Doom, but that opening track where you start sounds great. Especially the drums. And the 2nd "opening demo" level also sounds cool.

My next challenge is to get the IDE port working...

I've got a couple of questions. 😀

1) Can't get Dark Forces to play any music.
2) Can't get the IDE CD-ROM working/detected.

1) Dark Forces: inside its sound setup area, if I select "Soundscape synth" or General Midi (330) for the music, and then select the Test option, the cursor flickers slightly and that's it. It doesn't play the test tune, but luckily the sound setup utility doesn't lock up, so I'm able to quit normally.

2) When DOS is booting up, the CD-ROM drive attached to the Soundscape's IDE port is not detected.

Before I provide more details to the above 2 issues, the Soundscape does appear to work. I can hear music in Doom. Strangely, when I tested it a couple of times, on one occasion there was a strange "reverb" effect that made the music sound cheesy. (This reminded me of when I tested another similar soundcard, a Soundscape clone from Reveal.)

All of the important user configurable jumpers are set to their defaults. The IDE IRQ jumper was set to IRQ 15. I gave up with that after many failed attempts to get the Mitsumi quad speed IDE drive to be detected, and so I tried the jumper next to it, which is IRQ 12. That didn't work either.

My config.sys
DEVICE=C:\SCAPE\SSCD.SYS /B:330 <-- this initilises OK

DEVICE=C:\SCAPE\MTMCDAI.SYS /D:SSCD_000 <-- I did have /P:338 and /V as well, but the Mitsumi driver complained that they weren't valid parameters, so I removed them

LASTDRIVE=d

My autoexec.bat
c:\scape\mscdex /D:SSCD_000 /M:10 /L:d /E /V
PATH=c:\dos;c:\scape
SET SNDSCAPE=c:\scape
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D0 T1
c:\scape\ssinit.exe /I

The ssinit utility seems to work OK, either running it "stand alone" to mess about with its settings, or running it from the autoexec.bat. However, running from the autoexec.bat file, an error message appears saying that it can't find the windows system.ini file. That's understandable in my case, as I have not got windows (3.1) installed. Perhaps I should do?!

Finally, there's a utility to set up your CD-ROM drive. It's called cdinst.exe, and appears to function correctly. I ran it, and chose IDE (instead of the other propriatory CD-ROM drives). All it seems to do is add the SSCD.SYS line to config.sys and the mscdex line to autoexec.bat. As far as I can tell, it doesn't bother doing anything else.

As always on Vogons, any ideas would be very much appreciated! Thanks a lot people. 😀

Dark Forces problem solved: Inside the sound setup utility, I selected Soundscape as the digital audio card. That detection process was successful. Then, the music card detection (for Soundscape) was successful. Strange. In other words, I had to set the digital audio first, then the music.

As for the Mitsumi CD-ROM problem, I unplugged the data ribbon cable from the Soundscape and slaved the CD-ROM from the HDD instead. That worked. So, there's nothing wrong with the CD-ROM drive, or the driver, or the auto/config files. I just can't get MS-DOS to "see" the Mitsumi if it's attached to the Soundscape. Maybe I have to do something inside the mobo's BIOS? Perhaps I could try another mobo? I guess it's not too important. The main problem has been solved: Dark Forces music + digital audio works.

i have never used the cdrom connections on the Soundscape cards so I can't really help ya there. 😀 You shouldn't need anything other than the /d option for mscdex tho.

Isn't the BLASTER var supposed to be more like this for Soundscape? The init util assigns the x's later. If you install the 9x drivers you'll get a initss.bat with the DOS drivers that has this in it.
SET BLASTER=A220 IXX DX (something like this, I cant recall exactly)

Good to hear you got DF going. A strange issue indeed. I don't believe I've had problems like that before.

Hehe! Yes you're right regarding the "SET BLASTER=A220 IXX DX" line. I was just trying to be clever, and anticipated that as I hadn't run any setup procedure, I thought I'd convert those XXs in to meaningful numbers!

I like the opening DF theme - those cornets or trumpets (or whatever they are supposed to be) sound nice and crisp and sharp.

Regarding the iMuse sound set up issue: I think iMuse can be a bit "funny" sometimes! 😉

I think that it sounds better on the Elite than it does on a SCD-15 honestly. The biggest drawback for the Elite is that it has very synthy choir voices and the SCD-15 has somewhat better samples for this.