Hi everyone. I'm facing a weird issue with my board and would like to share my experience so far. I have a nice Super Socket 7 motherboard, Chaintech 5RSA2. It's an Ali Aladdin V MicroATX board with integrated ESS Solo 1 chip. According to various topics here on Vogons and sources on the Internet, the Aladdin V should support DDMA. Doesn't work for me, at least most of the time.

First hint that something is wrong occured during DOS initialization of the ESS Solo 1 - it initialized in Ali TDMA mode. Tried to force DDMA with hex editing of the ESSOLO.INI file and registry tweaks but with no avail. So I disabled the chip and tried external Terratec ESS Solo 1 PCI card. The same result, Ali TDMA.

Next, I tried Yamaha YMF724 and using SETUPDS.EXE the card initialized in DDMA mode (couldn't change it, it was greyed out, but that makes sense since I haven't enabled DSDMA TSR). The compability was very bad though - tried several games, including Doom and Build engine games, and witnessed only lock ups or crashes. There were several games that worked, including Wolf3D, Dark Forces and Warcraft II, so this makes me to believe that the DDMA mode is being utilized to a degree.

When checking the ESSOLO.COM file in a text editor, I can see string definition for both Ali TDMA and Ali DDMA modes so I guess the Ali DDMA mode should be working? Maybe on another chipset variant?

Has any of you successfully operated any PCI card in DDMA mode on this chipset? I have the basic model of the southbridge marked as M1543 (without C suffix) so perhaps this variant has defective DDMA... Who knows. I would be happy if you could share some experience on this topic. Thanks!