I know this is an almost 2 year bump but i got hold of one of these cards and got a little stumped as the card was getting recognized just fine but no sound at all. I cranked the volume really loud and listened to some noises that seemed taken out of an horror movie.

So i took the card out and investigated, turns out the card has traces on the -5V line, so i became immediately suspicious of an amp or opamp that needed the -5V line. So i got an adapter that generates the -5V line on the ATX connector and low and behold there was sound now. So these Prometheus Aria 16 cards do require the -5V line!

I need to test further but it seems HMI SOS drivers support for the Aria Chipset rely on the cards Sound Blaster emulation, which is a little bit annoying. The card has native capabilities, which would be better to use instead. There's no MSS3 support, only AIL2, AIL/32 and MIDPAK.

MIDPAK wasn't collaborating for some reason, and trying to use MIDPAK would result in my card not being found by Aria's tools anymore. AIL2 and AIL/32 stuff seemed to work just fine, although for some reason Bristlehog's PX player refused to play anything with ARIAXMID.ADV, claiming i was somehow using interrupt 16 (decimal) although i'm using interrupt 10 (decimal). PX is probably interpreting 10 as hex, making it think it is 16.

Other than that, the card as everyone already knew, is a bit underwhelming. Native digital sound is OK...ish and its own internal synth capabilities are a bit weak, like rightfully noted by Rich Heimlich himself in his old patch set reviews. But apparently the card was low end, and what it does considering that is actually OK. I'm curious if the ROM can be upgraded to the 1MB, provided it is out there, because installing a couple more SRAM chips on it is actually quite trivial for me.

Congrats on getting your hands on one of these. They are definitely interesting cards.

It's a bit frustrating to bring up, but I purchased a lot a few months ago that included what appeared to be a Viva Maestro 16VR, which uses the same chipset as the Prometheus Aria16 but comes with the full 1MB (2x 512MB) ROMs. Sadly, the seller just fell off the face of the earth and never shipped any of it. I ended up having to get a refund though the marketplace.

This is the only picture of the card I was able to get...

I still message the seller from time to time, but have not gotten a reply. This has happened to me twice in the past two years with sound cards that are either undocumented online or are just extremely rare.

Damn. That would have been a good opportunity to get those ROMS dumped.

carlostex wrote on Yesterday, 18:09:

Damn. That would have been a good opportunity to get those ROMS dumped.

Yeah, that 1MB ROM set was 80% of the reason I bought the entire lot of parts.

Between this Meastro card and the seemingly OPL4 equipped DCS Vibra16 that slipped through my fingers when the seller vanished into thin air a couple years ago... It's enough to make a collector go gray prematurely.