First post, by _NetNomad
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello! I recently got my hands on a Creative Labs MPB-000092 Rev 1.10 PCI soundcard. There are a surprising amount of them for sale on ebay for cheap and other places, so I figured it was worth taking a chance on, but I'm having trouble finding anything written about it. It has the same ES1938S chip as the ESS Solo-1 (which is funky if it's really a Creative Labs product!). I tried installing Solo-1 drivers on my HP T5720 with the latest FreeDOS version but I get an "AudioDrive Not Found" error when running autoexec.bat after making the appropriate changes to it and fdconfig.sys, and Adlib Tracker II won't start up, unable to find a sound card. Interestingly, I tried to set up generic ES1938S drivers and still got the same error on startup, but Adlib Tracker II will "find" a card and run, although you don't get any audio whatsoever.
I get the feeling I shouldn't have cheaped out and went for a real Solo-1 instead!
Does anyone have any experience with this card, or know of any drivers or other resources that could be helpful? Thank you for reading!
EDIT: For anyone with this same problem in the future, I have good news! I got the card working! The bad news is I have no idea how. Booted up the machine today without having touched anything since writing this post and when autoexec.bat first ran, it recognized the card just fine! It actually referred to it as a Solo which is very interesting because I was using the generic ES1938S drivers I found here and not the Solo drivers. Sometimes I have to quit out of software and re-enter in order for the card to sound right, almost as if it needs to warm up, but other than that it sounds awesome.
I'm still curious if anyone knows anything about this, though. I can't find any reference to it anywhere aside from sale listings. Why would Create Labs create a Solo-1 clone with a legit ESS chip? Is this even a "real" card or is it a clone with fake Creative Labs and ESS branding?