Reply 60 of 99, by elianda
- Rank
- l33t
Well Internet was not so common in 1996, so information traveled more slowly and Guillemot was not so well known for it's soundcards.
Basically the Terratec EWS64 was known to be THE professional solution. There were some rumors that the MaxiSound 64 Home Studio uses the same chipset and costs only 2/3rd of it. So I stepped into the unknown and bought one.
In review my rating is mixed.
Guillemot dropped the software support (in comparison to Terratec) for this card quite fast. So the state is more or less the default firmware that was also promoted by Dream when the SAM9407 was new. The most advanced app available are the NT maxi sound utilities.
On the other hand, if you don't need all the advanced features like a custom firmware a.s.o. even the default setup gives you the Dreams MIDI playback quality. Also the MaxiSound64 gives you a decent 4 MB ROM Wavetable. (with the drawback that you can not load soundfonts to RAM in DOS and need Win9x for this). So for Plug-In and go it is quite sufficient.
There was probably a not so good commercial success, the card was soon superseded by the Pro version with ESS and Dream. I guess the success of the EWS64 was alot better and that might be also a cause why Guillemot dropped support so fast.
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