So I have success. (well... success with research).

In my web searching and reading many posts/questions/etc... I came across this:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?373 … -in-Windows-3-1

But that landing page was no good... then I searched that file name and found this:
http://www.mpcdrivers.com/apps/filelistGP6-300.html

And voila!
Ensoniq Audio PCI Wavetable Sound Card (1370 chipset) Sound Drivers for Dos, Windows 3.x, Windows 95/98 and Windows NT!!

I went ahead and ordered a CT5803 sound card (it has the 1373 chip) and also a plain Ensoniq AudioPCI with the ES1370 chip.
I'm going to try both out when they come in. This is very promising! I'm hoping for Sound Blaster 16 emulation, but I'll settle for Sound Blaster.
I will post my results once the cards come in.

I was really hoping to find Windows 3.xx drivers for the Creative Labs CT4740 "Sound Blaster 16 PCI" in hopes that that would be pure SB16 compatible for Dos and Windows 3.xx... but I can't find anything windows 3.xx related for that card for the life of me.

On other news... The Sound Blaster Live does not work in Windows 3.xx regardless of what plain Sound Blaster drivers I decide to use. 1.0 or 1.5. So no dice on that.

magicmanred wrote:

In my web searching and reading many posts/questions/etc... I came across this:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?373 … -in-Windows-3-1

But that landing page was no good...

Did you try archive.org ?
https://web.archive.org/web/20110722094048/ht … m=ensoniq&st=kw

That eventually redirects to ftp://esupport:vImvF88@ftp.gateway.com/pub/ha … und/7501748.exe , but I can't tell if that's still up at the moment.

I actually got the drivers for the ES1370.
They are on my second link in the post above! 😀

I can't wait for the cards to come in for me to try. 😁
I downloaded all the drivers. For Dos, Win3.xx, Win9x, and NT. I use system commander on my machine and I have all of those OS's installed so this would be fantastic if they all work!!

As for the Sound Blaster 16 PCI... I went ahead and bought one on ebay in the original box and install CD.
I asked the seller what the CD said as far as what OS-installs it had. He said the CD states: Windows 95/98/ME/NT... so not very promising on DOS/Win3.xx, but you never know with the sound blaster install CD's.

I've heard that these Sound Blaster 16 PCI's have Ensoniq chips... but they aren't the ES137x. So I don't know if the drivers I downloaded for the ES1370 card will work for the SB16PCI (CT4740).
At least when the 1370 card comes in, I have definite drivers for it. I'll try using those drivers for the SB16PCI, and the other CT5803 with the ES1373 chip on it that I also ordered. No reason the 1373 wouldn't work with 1370 drivers as far as I'm concerned.

I'm going to have so many spare cards... 😒 hah

Except all of those you listed are just "basic sound", and in my opnion the Esoniq AudioPCI are utterly terrible sound quality (sounds like coming out of a wet sock). I've had and used em and would never pay money to hear anything through em even if the work. But that's just me. Also fairly sure you won't have any nice wavetable midi production with these cards like the higher end sound blaster AWE 32/64/live cards.

But if you manage to get -ANY- PCI sound card working for true-mode ms-dos and windows 3.11, do please document it.. I would love to know what you find and how you get it working.

Definitely going to document all of it and provide all links I possibly can in the event someone else crosses the same path.

Apparently there is an 8mb wavetable file for these cards that I also downloaded. Going to try to get that working as well.
I personally don't care for the awe32 and awe64 as they aren't as "compatible" as just a plain old sound blaster or sb16. Obviously they sound better and have less "noise" but I prioritize compatibility over all of that when it comes to this vintage stuff.

Lastly, this post was for "what PCI card works in windows 3.1 and DOS 6+, not which sound best. Obviously the choices are limited to begin with. (If any at all).

I always liked the Ensoniq Audio PCI soundcards and the 8MB wavetable set does make a difference. I first got one somewhere around 1999-2000 time frame.

squareguy wrote:

I always liked the Ensoniq Audio PCI soundcards and the 8MB wavetable set does make a difference. I first got one somewhere around 1999-2000 time frame.

This is great to hear!
I hope I can get it working in dos + win3.xx with the 8mb wavetable file!

Looking forward to getting the cards this coming week and setting it up!

So I have had success.
This is just a quick post until I get home with specifics... driver names/versions... etc...

So onto the success:
I had a few sound cards to try...
Any pci sound card with the ES1373, ES1371 or 1370 chip will work. They all use the same wave driver in the system.ini file for windows 3.11.
Another card that works with the same file is the Sound Blaster 16 PCI (CT4740) which doesn't have the ES137x chip.

Under DOS, all of these cards use the same drivers.

The pros:
• Working sound in DOS 6.xx and Windows 3.xx. And obviously 9x/NT
• Light weight TSR.
• Good option if you don't have ISA slots.

The cons:
• I can't find any working volume control/mixer for the sound cards in Win 3.xx. I have to crank the speakers quite high.
• Poor MIDI sound. MT32.exe /ON can remedy it a "little" bit... but it just isn't a Sound Blaster 16 if you know what I mean.
• You won't get to use most of the awesome Sound Blaster 16 software for Windows 3.11/3.1

Will update post later with specifics.
And if anyone comes across this post and needs help with setting these cards up... I have many saved autoexec/config files and drivers sitting around.

magicmanred wrote:

I actually got the drivers for the ES1370.
They are on my second link in the post above! 😀

Just tried - That link seems to be dead now.
Gratefuly, wayback has saved a copy here.

For the Windows 3.x (DOS) version, the zip file contains a disk set of three,
which differs from the one I used previously (set of two).

Edit: The package comes with and out-dated flavor of DOS4GW.
Replace it with DOS4GW v1.97, if you encounter any trouble.

Edit2: That software is a little bit finicky, it seems.
Update EMM386 (Himem optional) and add D=64. Also make sure the same
"DEFAULT.ECW" sounfont is available to both Windows and System directory.
And to the SoundScape directory, too.

Also check SNDSCAPE.INI in c:\eapci or c:\sys\eapci:
Watch out for IRQ=9, SBIRQ=7 (or 5) and the SynthFile path.

Last but not least, have a look at INITAP.BAT.
It contains the SET statements (BLASTER=,SNDSCAPE=)
and the path to APINIT.COM.

Make sure these are matching accordingly.

Sample:
SET SNDSCAPE=c:\sys\eapci
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 T2
CALL c:\sys\eapci\apinit.com

Oh, and also make sure the Windows SB driver
is configured to the same settings of the Virtual Sound Blaster.

I've been trying to get these drivers to work, the first problem I had was the setup had added emm386 to my config sys but it had pointed it at the windows directory not the dos directory. This caused the PC to freeze on boot.

Changing it to C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE worked for me and I now have working audio.

I'm now getting an error about MIDI synth not working and I cant run the mixer it's installed as that complains about missing components, but I think this is because I don't seem to have default.ecw anywhere.

I'm looking into this now.

*EDIT

I found EAPCI2M.ECW in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, copied it to DEFAULT.ECW and copied this to C:\WINDOWS and the sndscape dir. I'm not sure which one made it work I just made 3 copies 🤣

I was using Soundblaster 128 PCI (CT4810) in DOS and it was working. However, MIDI quaily was terrible, so I switched it to another ISA card. Haven' t tried it with Win 3.1, unfortunately.

kithylin, that's pretty much accurate. Unlike video cards and IO cards, sound cards lack an option BIOS and there is no way at a low level to communicate with the card unless the driver, application, or OS is PCI-aware. An old game, for example, can use a more modern graphics card because it can talk to the VESA BIOS (or system BIOS for that matter) and not the card itself. In the case of a sound card, however, the games and applications are specifically trying to call out to a card on the ISA bus. Unless there is some software layer that can "see" those calls and translate them to something the more modern PCI sound card understands, like enSoniq does, then no sound. Even in the case of enSoniq you need that middleware in place to do the translation because even though it's the best at working with DOS, the games still don't know how to talk to the PCI bus natively.

LChackr wrote:

kithylin, that's pretty much accurate. Unlike video cards and IO cards, sound cards lack an option BIOS and there is no way at a low level to communicate with the card unless the driver, application, or OS is PCI-aware. An old game, for example, can use a more modern graphics card because it can talk to the VESA BIOS (or system BIOS for that matter) and not the card itself. In the case of a sound card, however, the games and applications are specifically trying to call out to a card on the ISA bus. Unless there is some software layer that can "see" those calls and translate them to something the more modern PCI sound card understands, like enSoniq does, then no sound. Even in the case of enSoniq you need that middleware in place to do the translation because even though it's the best at working with DOS, the games still don't know how to talk to the PCI bus natively.

Are you responding to my above post in this thread? The one that's quite literally over 2 years old? ..... 😕

So I just did this again but with a slightly different sound card, and when I run the setup, it runs through as normal then asks to restart windows, but it doesn't install any software, drivers, or shortcuts. Any ideas?

The card I got it working on was an original Ensoniq PCI but this one is a CT5803 with the same ES173x chip

*EDIT: I've tried everything, so I got the soundcard I used last time out of the other machine and it still doesn't work! What am I missing, this worked fine last time 😖

BTW: both cards work fine on the same machine in DOS and under Win98 (it's dual-boot)

go and get ess-solo1 1938 and forget about the others.

In my case, I'm using a Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64V (ES1371). This driver didn't work for me, neither in DOS nor Windows 3.1.

For Windows 3.1:
InstallShield setup says "The Soundscape hardware has not been detected in your system...".
I tried to understand why.
I unzipped "APCI31WZ.EXE" from "7501748.exe", and found in SETUP.INS (after decompiling it) a call to FindAudioPCI() and it fails after that. This function could be found in DEAPCI.DLL, zipped into _SETUP.LIB.
In this DLL, I tried to switch some conditional jumps into inconditional. No success...
So, my card is not detected! and I don't know why.

For DOS:
I extracted DOS driver from "LEGACY.Z". When launching APINIT.COM, it says "error: PCI device detect failed; Device not found."
The version of this APINIT.COM is v2.38. I found others versions (v4.27 from my SB PCI 64V install disc, and v5.21 from an other SB PCI 128 install disc) and it works great!!

magicmanred wrote:

So onto the success: I had a few sound cards to try... Any pci sound card with the ES1373, ES1371 or 1370 chip will work. They […]
Show full quote

So onto the success:
I had a few sound cards to try...
Any pci sound card with the ES1373, ES1371 or 1370 chip will work. They all use the same wave driver in the system.ini file for windows 3.11.
Another card that works with the same file is the Sound Blaster 16 PCI (CT4740) which doesn't have the ES137x chip.

Not for me... 😢

I also tried to setup manually SYSTEM.INI and copy driver to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. I got the Ensoniq window, but dialog boxes remain empty.

In conclusion, I think only ES1370 chipset works with this driver

Sorry for ressurecting an old thread, but I think I am on the subject of this thread.

I am trying to use some of the drivers found here and some other places for both WFWG 3.11 and DOS 6.22 for ES1371 on VMWare Fusion 11.

As you may know, Fusion does not emulate the SB16, only Creative Audio PCI ES1371 (Some say it's a SBPCI 128).

I somehow managed to load it for DOS without errors apparently, but I don't have any simple game to test. And when I tried the above posts to solve how to set it up for Windows 3.X, it hangs up on startup. Apparently because I have c:\windows\system.ini with:

[drivers]
wave=crea1371.dll

And when I comment out that line, Windows starts but no sound still.

To sum up, I have no idea of what I am doing here.

Just another witness of PCI sound in Windows 3.11...

So..., I just received an Creative ES1371 Sound card (the chip is actually 1373) - I installed it - and tried the official driver from: 7501748.exe. No luck - the driver apparently installs - asks to restart computer but no file is copied or anything changed.

Then, I tried Watler's driver . http://turkeys4me.byethost4.com/programs/index.htm

Installation is simple enough: 1) copy crea1371.dll in Windows folder, 2) edit system.ini [drivers] wave=crea1371.dll - and ta da...! I was so convinced I have to fiddle around to hear a sound, but no... it worked at first restart... (and still works after another few restarts)

Now the bad part: sound will lag if I listen to an mp3 and move the mouse, it has some DJing effect... 😀) I don t think Ryzen 3900x is to blame for being to slow...

Can anyone give me a zip with installed drivers to manually copy the files and make some edits... Please.

OMORES wrote on 2020-06-11, 15:18:

Can anyone give me a zip with installed drivers to manually copy the files and make some edits... Please.

Hello everyone,
Sorry for not responding to this thread ealier.

I believe I do have some backups of my configuration mentioned above.
Not sure if they are helpful, though, since they use older/different drivers..

Jo22 wrote on 2020-06-11, 15:30:

I believe I do have some backups of my configuration mentioned above.
Not sure if they are helpful, though, since they use older/different drivers..

Can't wait... I have the files: windrv.z (71k) legacy.z (456k) & sndset.z (2.2mb) - but 7zip/WinRar can t decode them.