Bondi wrote on 2022-06-20, 17:08:

I accidentally found a game that natively supports DS201 device. It's Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. DS201 is the boring one, that has no SB emulation. Still turns out that there are games that support it. I don't have one to test, unfortunately.

That's because this game apparently uses DIGPAK drivers, which by the way have recently been open-sourced. The DIGPAK drivers include, among many others, a driver for the Digispeech DS201, the serial port variant without Sound Blaster emulation.

Unfortunately, the DIGPAK driver for the Digispeech DS201 is a foreground driver, which means that it freezes the game or application while playing back audio. That makes it unsuitable for most games that support or rely on DIGPAK drivers.

Last year I made a YouTube video, demonstrating what happens in Dune 2 when digital audio is played back through a DS201, after patching the game with this driver.

It would be cool if this DIGPAK driver could be enhanced to work as a background driver, which would (at least in theory) allow it to work with a lot of games that rely on DIGPAK or AIL2 drivers. It would suddenly make these little DS201 devices a lot more useful. 🙂

digger wrote on 2022-06-21, 10:06:

That's because this game apparently uses DIGPAK drivers, which by the way have recently been open-sourced. The DIGPAK drivers in […]
Show full quote

Bondi wrote on 2022-06-20, 17:08:

I accidentally found a game that natively supports DS201 device. It's Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. DS201 is the boring one, that has no SB emulation. Still turns out that there are games that support it. I don't have one to test, unfortunately.

That's because this game apparently uses DIGPAK drivers, which by the way have recently been open-sourced. The DIGPAK drivers include, among many others, a driver for the Digispeech DS201, the serial port variant without Sound Blaster emulation.

Unfortunately, the DIGPAK driver for the Digispeech DS201 is a foreground driver, which means that it freezes the game or application while playing back audio. That makes it unsuitable for most games that support or rely on DIGPAK drivers.

Last year I made a YouTube video, demonstrating what happens in Dune 2 when digital audio is played back through a DS201, after patching the game with this driver.

It would be cool if this DIGPAK driver could be enhanced to work as a background driver, which would (at least in theory) allow it to work with a lot of games that rely on DIGPAK or AIL2 drivers. It would suddenly make these little DS201 devices a lot more useful. 🙂

Ah, I see.
I've seen that video but totally forgot about it. And I also did not realize it was actually your video 😀 Did you move any further with making it work?
I also tried to select DSS and covox with this Lode Runner. But neither of them worked for some reason. Very strange as they work very straight forward.

The DIGPAK drivers for DSS and Covox are proper background drivers, so those should have worked. They did when I patched them into Dune II. 🤔

This seems like an appropriate place to post about this. I stumbled upon this freak of a card the other day and it was delivered today.

DSP Solutions (DigiSpeech) DS103J

Yep... it seems that DSP Solutions made a combination sound + network card by attaching the important parts of a DigiSpeech Plus (TI chip labeled DS301 and the GPS MVA70018CG) to an SMC network card and adding a (Sony?) CD-ROM interface for good measure. This is the only network + sound card I have ever seen or heard of, and I can find only one record of it anywhere on the internet, and at that link the person claims to have gotten sound and music out of it.

I have yet to figure out how to get the sound card portion of it working, but the Non-PNP device scan in the Windows 98SE add hardware wizard detected a Parallel Port and an SMC network card. Seems funny but also fairly logical if they simply implemented it as a completely internal version of the DigiSpeech Plus, wired internally to a parallel port. If this is the case, it's very likely that DigiSpeech Plus drivers will work for it.

Since it has a "headphone" jack (and an internal connector for a 2nd headset), I imagine that this was intended as an all in one solution for voice communication for business users who had access to a network but did not have access to a telephone line. Obviously this wasn't something that took off... 😮

I found no mention of it on the oldest archived copy of the DSP Solutions website, though it may have been lumped in with other DigiSpeech products.

👍 A great find! Just like you I could not find any mention of this card except for that single forum post.
Really curious if it's going to work with existing Digispeech drivers. Most probably yes given it sits on a parallel port.
Looking forward to seeing further testing results.

But why? 😀 It would make no economical sense to spin production run for anything less than ~1000 boards in the nineties. Wasnt DigiSpeech being pushed in partnership with IBM into edu market? Maybe a picky University with laundry list of requirements and this ridiculous contraption was conceived as means to win a contract?

I agree that looks like DSP Solutions was trying to enter communications market. As part of that they also had this "Internet telephone" version of their Digisepeech device.

I was able to find also this saved Dell support web page dedicated to this card https://web.archive.org/web/20050321132108/ht … ocs/dta/DS103J/

Bondi wrote on 2023-05-02, 14:44:

I was able to find also this saved Dell support web page dedicated to this card https://web.archive.org/web/20050321132108/ht … ocs/dta/DS103J/

Fantastic find! It's too bad the jumper images are broken, but at least there is some documentation of what they are. This is likely the only place to find this information unless someone has one of these with a manual squirrelled away somewhere. If I get a chance I'll try to transfer that info to a post here so it's easier to access and read.

It's also interesting that it says stereo headphones will be down mixed to mono. I'm not real familiar with DigiSpeech devices, and I suspected it would be mono since it only has one TDA1016, but it still seems a bit pathetic to have mono sound with a new card in 1994. 😅

I don't see anything about bypassing the onboard amp to use the output as a line out with amplified speakers, but... Being honest, it really doesn't matter. This isn't exactly going to be my go to card for retro gaming.

I found also this dell ftp site https://web.archive.org/web/20060503075658/ht … //ftp.dell.com/
Luckily all files seem to be saved, at least those I tried randomly, including audio section.
My guess is that the DSP Solutions card was installed in some of the Dell computers, so there are chances that the drivers are there as well. But the problem is that the file names are not informative.
Anyways it's probably worth downloading the whole archive as there are hundreds of files. Is there an easy way to do it?

Bondi wrote on 2023-05-03, 08:58:

I found also this dell ftp site https://web.archive.org/web/20060503075658/ht … //ftp.dell.com/ Luckily all files seem to be sav […]
Show full quote

I found also this dell ftp site https://web.archive.org/web/20060503075658/ht … //ftp.dell.com/
Luckily all files seem to be saved, at least those I tried randomly, including audio section.
My guess is that the DSP Solutions card was installed in some of the Dell computers, so there are chances that the drivers are there as well. But the problem is that the file names are not informative.
Anyways it's probably worth downloading the whole archive as there are hundreds of files. Is there an easy way to do it?

Yeah, Dell makes it a massive pain to identify their downloads. I guess it's worth a try though. I'm using the DownloadThemAll! extension to get the entire "Audio" folder right now. I might try network as well. I probably won't personally bother with the rest though since you pretty much have to manually extract and try to decipher the use of each individual driver from Dell.

Out of about ~300 files so far, I'd say that maybe 75% of them work. A lot are dead links, but most are downloading fine. I don't really understand how the internet archive picks and chooses what to backup... seems very strange. The more I search for obscure software for obscure old computer parts the more frustrated I get with the spotty archives. I hope the newer ones that are being made are more thorough.

Anyway, if anyone knows of either a filename "key" for Dell software to determine what they are for, or knows of a way to search all of these archives (once downloaded) for certain key words, it could save a lot of time.

I have my suspicions that I will not find any specific software for this here, but it's worth a try. Honestly, I haven't had time to tinker with it much yet and it's very possible that the standard DigiSpeech Plus drivers work fine... though I don't know how the CD-ROM interface would work.

EDIT: 595 out of 709 files downloaded, the rest are not actually there. Not bad though. We'll see if there's anything useful here I guess.

EDIT2: I just used "SearchMyFiles" to search for text within the whole folder I just downloaded and it found no mention of DS103J, DigiSpeech or some of the filenames mentioned on the other Dell page (DGSetup, etc.). I'm thinking it isn't here. It may be under network, but I just don't know. One thing that really stinks about downloading files from this archive is that they apparently lose their modified date? The modified and created dates on all ~600 files is now "today". 🙁 Makes it even harder to tell what is older.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-03, 12:10:

Yeah, Dell makes it a massive pain to identify their downloads. I guess it's worth a try though. I'm using the DownloadThemAll! […]
Show full quote

Bondi wrote on 2023-05-03, 08:58:

I found also this dell ftp site https://web.archive.org/web/20060503075658/ht … //ftp.dell.com/ Luckily all files seem to be sav […]
Show full quote

I found also this dell ftp site https://web.archive.org/web/20060503075658/ht … //ftp.dell.com/
Luckily all files seem to be saved, at least those I tried randomly, including audio section.
My guess is that the DSP Solutions card was installed in some of the Dell computers, so there are chances that the drivers are there as well. But the problem is that the file names are not informative.
Anyways it's probably worth downloading the whole archive as there are hundreds of files. Is there an easy way to do it?

Yeah, Dell makes it a massive pain to identify their downloads. I guess it's worth a try though. I'm using the DownloadThemAll! extension to get the entire "Audio" folder right now. I might try network as well. I probably won't personally bother with the rest though since you pretty much have to manually extract and try to decipher the use of each individual driver from Dell.

Out of about ~300 files so far, I'd say that maybe 75% of them work. A lot are dead links, but most are downloading fine. I don't really understand how the internet archive picks and chooses what to backup... seems very strange. The more I search for obscure software for obscure old computer parts the more frustrated I get with the spotty archives. I hope the newer ones that are being made are more thorough.

Anyway, if anyone knows of either a filename "key" for Dell software to determine what they are for, or knows of a way to search all of these archives (once downloaded) for certain key words, it could save a lot of time.

I have my suspicions that I will not find any specific software for this here, but it's worth a try. Honestly, I haven't had time to tinker with it much yet and it's very possible that the standard DigiSpeech Plus drivers work fine... though I don't know how the CD-ROM interface would work.

EDIT: 595 out of 709 files downloaded, the rest are not actually there. Not bad though. We'll see if there's anything useful here I guess.

EDIT2: I just used "SearchMyFiles" to search for text within the whole folder I just downloaded and it found no mention of DS103J, DigiSpeech or some of the filenames mentioned on the other Dell page (DGSetup, etc.). I'm thinking it isn't here. It may be under network, but I just don't know. One thing that really stinks about downloading files from this archive is that they apparently lose their modified date? The modified and created dates on all ~600 files is now "today". 🙁 Makes it even harder to tell what is older.

There are multiple captures of that ftp site from 2002 till 2012, so maybe the missing files are still available. If you give me an example of a missing file, i can try to find it.
As for the text search, does it work for self-extracting archives?
And yes, did you try the Digispeech drivers? Maybe they work, and it's not really worth messing with this Dell archive.

EDIT: no luck with missing files. The absent ones are not saved throughout all captures.