ah yes this looks legit!

There is compaq part number on it. CPQ# 214240-001.

Cheers,

Interesting, in that case those chips are probably salvaged parts from daughterboards showed in the first post. The information about ES982 chips is so scarce that I'm starting to believe they were used only on handful of Compaq boards and nothing else.

I have an interesting discovery to share - I have found out that ES982 chips were used in some Compaq laptops too, in the docking station to be more specific. You can see the pictures on this site together with Doom E1M1 MIDI sample. I must say it sounds promising, definitely better than ES981P wavetable. I have asked the owner for more MIDI samples, hopefully he will be able to provide them.

I have found out that ES982 chips were used in some Compaq laptops too

COMPAQ Armada 7300 series - 7330T, 7350MT, 7360DMT, 7362DMT, 7370DMT, 7380DMT
COMPAQ Armada 7700 series - 7710MT, 7730MT, 7750MT,7770DMT, 7790DMT, 7792DMT

Yeah, 7300 and 7700 series seem to be the only ones that have those chips in TSOP form factor...

I thought the incorrectly written "COPY RIGHT" was an amusing giveaway, but seems from @detalite's pic that ESS did it that way too.

Notable differences to this line of text in the China chips is that the first one prefixes it with ® (which makes no sense) and the ones posted after that use (c) but not ©. Curious.

Yeah, 7300 and 7700 series seem to be the only ones that have those chips in TSOP form factor

Compaq Armada 7400 and 7800 series uses ES692F with integrated 1MB ROM.

ES690F and ES689 have 21 bit adress space (up to 4MB). ES981 needs only 19 bit adress and ES982 should have 20 bit address line. There is one question, does those synthesizer have some kind of ROM autodetection mechanism.

PS. After listening to the samples there is noticably less compresion in high-pitched sounds.

Yes, that's true. It's just ES981P and ES690F integrated into one chip.