Nobody knows if this soundcard works in plain DOS?

Did some Google searching...
I found this: http://www.it-he.org/sound.htm#maestro2
And this: http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/ … roductType=3300

I searched yesterday, and didn't found anything (except drivers related to Linux).

Very good info, I'll try ASAP. Thanks you.

ESS != Ensoniq. ESS Maestro-2 was PCI-based chipset. At the time it shipped DOS lost most of its relevance so separate DOS drivers were never published. I never had personal experience with this particular chip but there is a good chance that there is DOS driver buried somewhere in Win95/98 drivers. Try the official site http://www.esstech.com/techsupp/drivers.shtm#pci. The driver package contains some utility called maestro.com which looks like DOS initialization/Soundblaster emulation tool. Try it.

Renamed the thread to reflect this info (Zup, I hope you don't mind).

vasyl: I found that site but didn't see any DOS drivers explicitly listed. Did you find that utility in one of the Win9x packages?

HunterZ: Yes, it is inside. Most older PCI sound card had DOS configuration utilities coming with Win9x drivers, Maestro2 is not an exception. The page looks like VXD and WDM drivers are in different packages, in fact, they are in the same file.

ES1968 is not a Ensoniq chip? I thought it was... I'll try the drivers today and post the results...

Shit! MAESTRO.COM relies on Windows drivers. No sound in pure DOS.

What about the DOS drivers I linked in my first post in this thread?

Not Working. My sound card is a ES1978 (ESS Maestro 2E, I wrote I had a Maestro 2, sorry), not a ES1868.

Also, I found ESS drivers page: http://www.esstech.com/techsupp/drivers.shtm

It seems ESS never released generic pure DOS drivers for PCI chipsets, and Toshiba doesn't have DOS drivers either. DOS support is offered by Windows drivers.

I guess I'll try Googling again...

Shouldn't your games work fine under Windows 98SE command prompt? It's been a loooooong time since I played games in Win98 command prompt (and since I had an ISA card I simply played them in real ms-dos instead).

But I don't really remember any issues with 9x command prompt. Obviouslly there will be some like JEMM games and their ilk but most games should work fine.

OK, I've installed Windows 98 SE over the DOS partition (now, the Laptop has 4 OS: MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 and Debian 3.1), breaking GRUB and tried the sound drivers from Toshiba.

The sound works (as expected). Then, I booted in pure DOS. Tried MAESTRO.COM. The sound worked and didn't complain about not in Windows 98.

Japanese poltergeist?

P.S.: I keep wondering why the video driver supports Direct3D in Windows 98, but not in Windows 2000...

2000 comes with DX7 unless you upgraded it, IIRC 98SE comes with DX6?

I noticed once you upgrade from DX7 to DX8/DX9 (or was it 7 too?) that the Direct3D option will be grayed out, whereas with DX7 and below it will be able to be chosen. This happens on some chipsets. I can only assume that these chipsets don't support DX8/DX9 and these newer versions of DX simply don't register the older DX ver supported by the video card. I'm not sure if the games still run using some of the DX acceleration features of the card or in software D3D....probably the later....but most likely the old games just revert to DirectDraw.

Zup wrote:

Japanese poltergeist?

Nope, most likely the DOS drivers for your soundcard just look up some files in the Windows directory for settings.

Looks like I have the same problem. So is there any way to figure it out without installing Win 98?
Can you provide your autoexec and config sys? Maybe something will be in it?

This is a 10 year old thread. Start a new one in Marvin since this is an old hardware/driver issue. This forum is for DOS games.

I already split his post off to here:
ESS1978 driver installation

So, now I'm locking this thread.