Excellent! I was hoping that the Harmony would be essentially a Soundscape Opus. Thank you for testing and reporting back. There used to be a ton of these on eBay for less than $10, but supply seems to be drying up.

Indeed, thank you for the tip in my other thread! 😀 There are a few more on eBay right now in the $20+shipping price range, I believe. Even at that price I feel like it's still a good buy for an excellent DOS wave-table sound card.

For what it's worth I also have two of the VIVO variants, the VIVO-90DB and VIVO-A, and neither of them are very useful in DOS. Almost all of the old Sierra titles refuse to work with their Soundblaster emulation, and I found the necessary TSR to be pretty flaky too. So the OPUS boards are definitely the better of the DOS-friendly Ensoniq sound cards that are still somewhat easy to find.

That's a nice find for only $8.
Thank you for the pictures.

FesterBlatz wrote on 2016-12-20, 14:18:

For anyone who's interested... […]
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For anyone who's interested...

I purchased one of these for $8 on eBay and just received it yesterday. It's definitely an Ensoniq OPUS variant with the same 1M patch ROM, and appears to be made in the US by Ensoniq just like their retail boards...meaning very high quality.

I only have DOS on my 486, but the board works exactly the same as a regular OPUS and uses the same SSINIT/CodeFile. The only functional difference is, to use it in a DOS environment you need to either have a PnP-aware BIOS or Intel PnP Configuration Manager (ICM) installed to configure the modem's COM port. Otherwise in my case it conflicted with my mouse on COM1. Once I configured it in the ICM tool it automatically assigned the modem to COM3 and no longer conflicted either of my two existing COM ports.

I spent several hours trying various games and getting to know the card and for $8 I'm thrilled. Here's a few detailed pictures...note the "COW" chip seems to have been replaced with a larger 84-Pin PLCC FPGA by Actel, presumably to handle the additional PnP resources for the on-board modem.

1.jpg

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Did you ever find any Windows 95/98 drivers for this card?

Well, I found a driver that works — but it bricked the card. So as a word of warning if anyone else has one of these — don’t do the mandatory “update” the readme says you have to do. Like the readme says, it will show up as “NEC UnknownDevice” in device manager but it will at least work. Whatever was in that flash though killed the card. The PC won’t even post if it’s installed.

Back to the Vivo. A pity too because from what I heard the opus sounds much better than the vivo. It has reverb/chorus baked into the samples — still not real effects but better than the dry samples of the Vivo.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2022-03-14, 19:32:

Well, I found a driver that works — but it bricked the card. So as a word of warning if anyone else has one of these — don’t do the mandatory “update” the readme says you have to do. Like the readme says, it will show up as “NEC UnknownDevice” in device manager but it will at least work. Whatever was in that flash though killed the card. The PC won’t even post if it’s installed.

Back to the Vivo. A pity too because from what I heard the opus sounds much better than the vivo. It has reverb/chorus baked into the samples — still not real effects but better than the dry samples of the Vivo.

Where did you find that driver ? I have the Ens288.zip described at soundcard-drivers.com for it....
Maybe some one here has one and can dump it's ROM contents so you could flash it back.....

Horun wrote on 2022-03-14, 23:03:

aspiringnobody wrote on 2022-03-14, 19:32:

Well, I found a driver that works — but it bricked the card. So as a word of warning if anyone else has one of these — don’t do the mandatory “update” the readme says you have to do. Like the readme says, it will show up as “NEC UnknownDevice” in device manager but it will at least work. Whatever was in that flash though killed the card. The PC won’t even post if it’s installed.

Back to the Vivo. A pity too because from what I heard the opus sounds much better than the vivo. It has reverb/chorus baked into the samples — still not real effects but better than the dry samples of the Vivo.

Where did you find that driver ? I have the Ens288.zip described at soundcard-drivers.com for it....
Maybe some one here has one and can dump it's ROM contents so you could flash it back.....

It's in the NEC FTP archive. I had a second Harmony with some blown ICs that I used to dump the ROM with the included NEC tool -- but restoring it isn't possible when the PC won't post.

Thinking that the ROM must be the socketed chip I swapped them between cards to see if that resolved the issue -- but it still wouldn't post.

I'll eventually get around to "fixing" the card with the blown ICs (a voltage regulator and an op-amp) by scavenging from the bricked card.

Does the ENS288.zip have modem drivers? Or did you just use the generic windows drivers? I gave up looking for that file after a couple weeks.

No modem drivers, just NEC labeled Win95 sound drivers...and it does have a very small EEPROM update, from the .TXT file:
"Program the PnP eeprom on the Harmony card (this is required even if you have done this previously because the card signature has changed)"

Horun wrote on 2022-03-15, 13:29:

No modem drivers, just NEC labeled Win95 sound drivers...and it does have a very small EEPROM update, from the .TXT file:
"Program the PnP eeprom on the Harmony card (this is required even if you have done this previously because the card signature has changed)"

Yeah that's the one -- my card didn't like that update at all. Also -- it was 253 bytes but when I dumped the card later the EEPROM was 256 bytes.

YMMV