Here's something I picked up a while ago and completely forgot about. I found it in my laptop bag just now & figured you guys would be as amused as I was.

Soundcard! In a box. Clearly. On the front it advertises all kinds of nice things, like SB Pro compatibility, "Dual Type F DMA support", whatever that means (they probably mean DDMA), "programmable power management" (really?), "64-bit PCI" (REALLY?), and a "standard" 15-pin game/MIDI port. This will be important later.

There's also a lovely picture of a violinist to let you know it's a high-end product. It also helpfully advertises "$5.00" and "as-is", always comforting to see on a brand new product.

Flip it around, and:

...more of the same, except here it claims to support all the way up to Windows 8 and MacOS. Insert squinty Fry eyes meme here.

Let's see what's inside:

Yep, the barest-bones ESS Solo-1 card I've ever seen and a pressed (not burnt) mini-CD. Of course it's a standard 32-bit PCI card, not 64-bit PCI(-X) as claimed by the box, but I imagine everyone already figured that out.

The CD purports to have a nicely organized collection of drivers sorted by OS for not just this card, but every possible low-rent ESS & C-Media chip they might have been selling. Unfortunately it's also full of read errors and no amount of ddrescue-ing managed to extract anything useful off it. I don't even understand how this is possible, to be honest.

The Solo-1 is a pretty good chip, though, right? After all, that's the only reason I bought it. But let's have a closer look at how they cut corners:

...by omitting the metal shield for the MIDI port. I have literally never seen that before (on DOS/Windows-era stuff, discounting some really old 8-bit machines, etc.) and I've seen a lot of shonky cheaping out in my time. How much could this have saved them, like 0.3 cents?! I'm surprised it was in an anti-static bag and not just thrown in the box if this is the standard they were working to.

That said,

Here's a COMPLETE bank of unpopulated solder pads on the other side of this port. I'd be surprised if it even works at all. The box claimed it has one, but maybe they figured no one would notice if they just didn't bother to activate it.

There's some empty pads for resistors up by the audio jacks too, but thankfully most of the filter caps seem to be present. Considering how sparse the card is in general though, I can't see any kind of audio quality coming out of this thing.

Anyway, that's all. I haven't tried it yet so no idea if it works or if it's even a legit Solo-1 chip. I don't have any PCI Macs anymore so I can't test that purported "MacOS" compatibility, but I have serious doubts MacOS drivers for any Solo-1 variant exist. Have you guys ever seen something this shonky? It raises (lowers) the bar another notch for me.