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MPB-000092?

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First post, by _NetNomad

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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?

Reply 1 of 2, by SpiceOrange

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Hey I'm super late with a reply but I also got an "MPB-000092" sound card because I was cheaping out on getting a (2nd) ESS SOLO-1, and I am amazingly enough also installing it into an HP T5720. Since I came to some interesting conclusions I thought I'd update here since it's easy to find this thread via google.

What I was able to find is with the normal ES1938S drivers in Windows 98 I get WAV files working but midi doesn't work, FM (adlib & soundblaster) doesn't work, and trying to use the DOS drivers in full DOS mode crashes the machine.

So I did some digging with the other ID on the card: SC1938. It turns out this card was sold as the "eDio Hi-Live PCI Sound Card SC1938," seems like a bunch were sold new-old-stock until recently, and thankfully someone uploaded the driver CD that came with that kit to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ediohilivedrv

These drivers seem very similar to the usual ESS driver. However my results with the CD drivers are quite a bit better. When I installed the Win98SE/ME driver included on the disc, I get WAV files working, General MIDI works in Windows 98 when configured to use Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth but not with ESFM Synthesizer, and in game both SoundBlaster (tested DOOM) and Adlib sound works (tested SkyRoads).

The disc does not come with a separate DOS driver. However the separate driver on the disc for Win98/95 does include the esssolo.com program that loads the ESS TSR. On attempting to load this it complains about PnP OS selected in BIOS and nothing works -- and there's no option to turn off PnP OS in the BIOS on the HP T5720. I'm not up to testing it but I suspect the DOS situation would be better on another machine as from what I can tell an ESS SOLO-1 doesn't usually work in DOS on the HP T5720.

It is a bit disappointing that the ESFM synth doesn't work but overall having DOS games launched from Windows 98 working mostly normally is a good result for me.

Reply 2 of 2, by Stiletto

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SpiceOrange wrote on 2020-08-16, 03:32:

On attempting to load this it complains...

Try UNISOUND, DOS sound drivers' new darling. Normally things like ESSSOLO run fine, but when faced with weird problems like that... check with UNISOUND.
UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

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