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Bought a really weird ISA Soundcard for $1 dollar, sadly no drivers are found

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First post, by BLockOUT

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Today i went to the house of an old man because he was selling a nice old pentium CPU that i wanted for a long time because it is unlocked. He told me he had some ISA cards in a box, and was selling each card for 1 dollar. Some cards in the box were known, some cards were really weird and i saw this one that so far i have never seen a picture of it on google images or ebay. Searched everywhere, google, yahoo, bing, and nothing matches.

The card brand is TopTek and the model is GS30 (Golden sound 3.0)
the only information i was able to find about this card is this : https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/sound-cards-mult … -SOUND-VER.html

this is the card i bought:

gold1.jpg
gold2.jpg

Sadly drivers are not found anywhere online

The only drivers available are for toptek golden sound 2.5, and the card is completetly different from golden sound 3.0

toptek golden sound 2.5:
golden25.jpg

So here i am,
Vogons is like the last hope for me, maybe someone, some collector, anybody with the knowledge of retro hardware can help.
How can i make this card work? does anyone here have this card? can someone share correct DOS drivers or install floppy images to make this card work on a good old computer?

thanks

Reply 2 of 6, by DerBaum

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Doesnt it just work without a driver?
Your card is set to Address220H IRQ7 DMA1 ... You could just try to run doom, duke nukem 3d or Monkey island . I use these games as basic tests for any sound. I have noticed that Duke initialises the weirdest soundcards by itself.

FCKGW-RHQQ2

Reply 3 of 6, by Jo22

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I think the same. It should look to software same as an Sound Blaster 1.x or Sound Blaster 2.0.
There's no special driver software needed.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 4 of 6, by Horun

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It is a Sound Blaster 2 clone AFAIK and should not need drivers for basic compatibilty.
There is two driver disks (for win3x and demo/samples??) for the Golden Sound v2.5 and Golden Sound Pro II here: https://archive.org/download/TopTek-Golden-Sound-Drivers
There is a readme in disk 1 and there is also a foreign site with some info but haven't translated it yet (might be same as the readme)...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 5 of 6, by BLockOUT

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wow, i always thought you needed a driver to make the games work with sound under DOS. I have zero knowledge on 8bit ISA cards.

I always thought that even original Adlib card needed a driver or some sort of TSR like the "sound.com" file

I will try it without any driver then

Reply 6 of 6, by Horun

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You might want to add the Set Blaster line to your autoexec.bat that matches your card the way it is set, it would be : Set BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T3
You might find a conflict with printer port being both on IRQ7 but only if the port is in use when using the sound card....
Also you can try the Creative test prog for SB Pro to see if it passes and if not why (it should work on a clone iirc).
Do not test in a 486 faster than say a DX-66, those cards were designed for XT and 286....

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Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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