First post, by WyndC
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