First post, by Ozzuneoj
- Rank
- l33t
I've had this card for months and have been meaning to make a thread about it. It's nothing fancy, it's just such an oddity.
Here it is.
Yep, an ISA ESS Audiodrive ES1868 + ESS Tel.eDrive based modem which is also equipped with an ESS ES692S wavetable synth!
Never seen anything like it aside from this one (and one more that the seller seems to still have, which is listed on multiple marketplaces online).
Interestingly, it also came with a microphone, telephone line and drivers (zip file containing the contents of both disks is attached to this post).
Once I got my hands on it I thought to myself: "Nice, lets throw this thing into a system and just use it as a soundcard."....
... or not! They managed to make a modem that contains a wonderful sound chip and a very solid wavetable synth, but they didn't even put an audio OUTPUT on it!
I probed around a bit on the card and managed to find an internal audio connection (J2). I had to wire up a connector to fit it and then that must be connected to another sound card via line-in\aux\CDROM etc.
In this picture, the top most pin of J2 (white wire) is the left channel. The center pin is ground (black) and the bottom pin is the right channel (red). Pretty simple. Ignore the other plug with the yellow wire... that's what was left from the original end of the cable.
Anyway, I didn't get to do a ton of testing with it. The reason it has taken me so long to post about it is that I was planning to do more extensive testing, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I figured I should just post what I know before I totally forget it all. 🤣
Relevant system specs:
440BX Motherboard
Pentium III 850Mhz Slot 1
AWE64 as main sound card
In the limited time I spent with the card, I only got it fully functioning under Windows 98SE, mostly due to it needing to be run through a second sound card. I didn't spend much time playing with it in DOS. Even though the driver disks say "Windows 95 Drivers", the second disk does appear to have at least some DOS and Windows 3.1 drivers. I do not know if it's possible to get the wavetable functioning in DOS.
Under Windows 98Se with the drivers installed (it seemed to require the modem drivers to function, but again, there may be another way), the card worked pretty much as expected. The wavetable sounded decent but appeared to have hanging notes when I would stop a song (playing basic MIDI files with media player). I know my PIII 850 was way more than was needed so I decided to try it with a slower CPU (266Mhz PII, running at 200Mhz), and surprisingly, that fixed the hanging note issue when stopping songs.
I also tested the ESS FM synth and it also worked but had a bit of an odd sound to it... sort of a "ringing" sound around some notes\instruments. I guess there's a possibility that I was also hearing the AWE64's CQM mixed in with it... I can't say I've ever played with FM music piped from one sound card to another under Windows like this, so I don't know if it's possible to hear both together.
Anyway, I want to tinker with it more at some point, and when I do I'll post here.
If it's possible to easily use the card under DOS for digital sound, ESFM and wavetable synth, it could make a very interesting "daughtercard" type solution to add these features to another sound card without any external pass-through required.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
