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HP T5720 using ESS Allegro 1989 drivers, failure for dos sound

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First post, by WyndC

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I had a Yamaha card that I could never get to work, which I ordered from ebay following the original Phil guide. I purchased a ESS 517, titled as Ess Allegro 1989 XWAVE. I haven't owned an older PC like his since the mid 90s, so I'm honestly embarrassed to ask, but I've been searching the web to find a solution or at least get me in the right direction and it doesn't seem to be working still. I see a crap load of sound threads on here for ESS or Yamaha, but those didn't quite help either. If you have any feedback or experience let me know.

I dug around for drivers, the driver for ESS hardware on Vogon did not work. The drivers I did install show up as three separate entries under System > Device Manager > Sound
-ESS Allegro-1 Device Manager
-ESS Allegro-1 DOS Emulation
-ESS Allegro-1 PCI AudioDrive

Win98 sounds and music are perfect, but any dos sounds don't work. I will say t hat I do get music to play in Duke3d and CD music to play in Quake.

With the setup for ESS, it also provides me with the files for autoexec.bat to read, the ESSAUDIO.SYS, ESSAUDIO.INI, etc. I updated my autoexec.bat, config.sys and autoexec dos following the guidelines, but no sound still. I get he typical vague "playback failure, possibly due to DMA blah blah". However, that's not the case. I thought maybe it was due to my SIS Audio drivers, so I disabled those, but that didn't help. I swapped DMA 8bit and 16bit channels, trying every combination.

Am I fighting a losing battle, or is it possible to get these cards to work on these units?

I saw the ESS DOS drivers from here, but those were the same exact files as the ESS setup provided, but copying over my current files, it doesn't change anything for the better.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks,

WyndC

Reply 1 of 9, by cyclone3d

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Took me a bit to find the thread where I posted the fix for the PCI riser and the AW744-L2 sound card. It should also fix issues with other cards. The PCI riser needs to be populated with capacitors.

Low volume out of Cobra AW744L II card

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 2 of 9, by WyndC

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cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-23, 03:23:

Took me a bit to find the thread where I posted the fix for the PCI riser and the AW744-L2 sound card. It should also fix issues with other cards. The PCI riser needs to be populated with capacitors.

Low volume out of Cobra AW744L II card

Actually I'm not using a riser. I populated my riser and it didn't work, maybe I used the caps, I even attempted to just bridge the points on the riser (not the radial caps) to see if I could get something to run. Once I plug the riser in, my system won't even power on. right now I'm using a 5inch extension PCI cable into the sound card for testing purposes. Are you saying that the sound WILL only work with the caps? With my Yamaha card, I couldn't get ANY music or sound to play with the caps or no caps installed.

Thanks for the follow up.

Reply 3 of 9, by cyclone3d

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If you just bridges the small cap spaces, you have caused shorts to ground which should not be there. SMD caps will be tan/brown in color. Resistors will be black.

From what I could find, the sound will only work properly with the riser populated with caps. Make sure the polarity is correct on the radial caps.

There are some cards that do work without the caps such as some other Yamaha YMF744 based cards I have. Not sure why as I couldn't see much difference in the AOpen design and the others.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 4 of 9, by WyndC

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cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-23, 15:25:

If you just bridges the small cap spaces, you have caused shorts to ground which should not be there. SMD caps will be tan/brown in color. Resistors will be black.

From what I could find, the sound will only work properly with the riser populated with caps. Make sure the polarity is correct on the radial caps.

There are some cards that do work without the caps such as some other Yamaha YMF744 based cards I have. Not sure why as I couldn't see much difference in the AOpen design and the others.

I had asked you in the past to help me by populating the card for me and testing with your setup? If I pay for your time and shipping both ways, do you think you could assist? I still can't PM here yet. I put this project to the side awhile ago and haven't been back. However, this site is really great.

Reply 6 of 9, by WyndC

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Thanks I appreciate it. I'll ship it out this week. Just let me know what I owe you. If I still can't msg by then, just msg your paypal address or I can send you a gift card or something. I picked up a GX150 Dell as well. having to connect cables from your cdrom drive to a sound card brings back memories 🤣.

Thanks

Reply 8 of 9, by WyndC

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hey Cyclone3d, I ended up purchasing a GX150 and a GX260 Dell to run the Windows98 games. That HP had a bunch of issues running certain Dos games, real hardware seems to work well.

I ended up doing a FX5200 AGP with a modified LP bracket, a 5.25 to 3.5 cradle with a 140GB drive for this cradle as well as the main drive. I purchased a SB0100 sound card which I attached the cd in cable into and there's a USB extension cable I did for a USB SD card reader. This allows me to transfer files faster than any of the flash drives I had. The second hard drive only has my Disk Images as I use Daemon Tools for originally created ISOs and "found" games.

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