Terratec ESS-Solo1 PCI Soundcard with PIII>500
I own this card and in my opinion it is the best soundcard if you still want to have music and sfx in older dosgames
and your machine has no isa-slot any more or a dos-compatible onboard-sound.
It has the ESS1936 chip and only need the "essolo.sys" loaded in the config.sys and the "essolo.com" in the autoexec.bat.
I think there is also a mixer tool for dos available.
Beside that, the solo1 has win9x wdm-drivers and also vxd-drivers. The vxd-driver also installs a "dos-compatible-device" in
the win98se device-manager. I still do load "essolo.sys" and "essolo.com" over config.sys/autoexec.bat before win98 boots up
and I have opl-sound and sfx in dos-games and dos-demos wihle running windows98se.
But there are some issues with some dos-games and their sounddrivers that I did not understand.
Prince1:
Prince of Persia runs fine in plain dos. I have opl-music and sfx. Fantastic!
Prince2:
I have opl-music and speech, but it stops/hangs after a view spoken lines in the intro 🙁
Pinball-Dreams 1/2/Fanatsies:
No way to get SB-Support. I only hear knack, knack, knack. 🙁
Adlib is working indeed, but sounds "scratchy" 🙁
Beside that, LPT-Dac also sounds "scratchy" 🙁
Epic-Pinball:
No sound at all 🙁
Pinball-Illusion:
No sound at all 🙁
Pinball Extreme:
Seems be be OK for me 😀 Don'T know why all the other Pinball games have these problems 🙁
Shadow-Warrior(Normal and 3dfx-Version):
Argh, I can't get any sound or music in this game, that's very bad 🙁
It uses some sort sound-engine that duke3d uses, BUT duke3d has the support for a DAC that could perhaps help me
getting sound and music in shadow-warrior?
Blake-Stone:
Runs fine, I have sound and music. Fantastic 😀
Biomance:
Somtimes Sound and music is detected, mostly not. 🙁
Lot's of cool Demos/Intros with either opl-music and/or disgisound run great.
Never got the working with another PCI-Card with a machine that fast 😀
Therefore still the best PCI-Soundcard if you target dos as well.
Is it possible to get even more games working with it?
Is there any option of "patching" shadow-warrior to recognize my Solo1 or getting LPT-Dac feature like in Duke3d?
Greetings
Doc
Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines