elianda wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:49:

Do you hear sound from the card in plain DOS?

Running maxinit.exe or volume.exefrom the DOSMAXI folder in pure DOS gets me a "Maxi Sound 64 not found" error message, even after running setup.exe.

If I run it from a Windos 98 command prompt window instead, they seem to work fine, except after listing a bunch of stuff, maxinit.exe lastly asks "no card?". I have no idea how, but one time I had it tell me "Cannot go into UART mode"instead of the "no card?" question. No sound in games.

Attached some pictures.

Edit: I could have sworn I had already done this, but PnP OS in BIOS was set to yes.
I set it to no, and now the card behaves in rebooted to DOS mode just as it does in W98 SE DOS command window mode: no more "maxi 64 not found" error.

However, maxinit.exe (and subsequently autoexec.bat) now leads to a cursor that seemingly blinks forever. Believing this might be due to the sheer size of my 10MGMGS sound bank, I let it load a 1MBank instead, but to no avail. The only way out is to CRTL+ALT+DEL into a restart.

I looked at the card again, found no obvious damage, but a 4M/16M jumper for the memory. Since I had already inserted a 16 meg stick, but the jumper was still at 4M, I figured that might be the cause for the blinking cursor of death, but changing it to the correct setting did not work either.
I gave the card a good scrubbing with isopropylene just because, but that apparently hasn't helped either.

Next thing I tried: removing the 16 MB 60ns 72 pin SIMM, putting the jumper for 4 or 16 MB SIMM in a neutral position. Still no sound in Windows, still blinking cursor of death when I attempt to initialize in pure DOS.

Hello everyone!

Recently I acquired a Guillemot Maxi Sound Home Studio 64 Pro card (based on ESS1868 with a S/PDIF daughterboard). The drivers from the Guillemot FTP mirror do not work for it, as pointed by kixs. The card came with a hard drive from its previous owner, who used the card. That drive had Windows 98 and the card's drivers installed. Unfortunately, the original installation CD is missing, so it would be great if someone could share it. Meanwhile, I examined the contents of the hard drive.

Essentially, the drivers are almost identical to those for the Dynamic 3D, but there are differences:

- G8500V17.BIN - The firmware. The internal name inside the file is different: in D3D it's M64LITB, while in 64 Pro it's g8500V17. There are also binary differences, possibly due to file offset shifts from the different name length. If you use the Dynamic 3D firmware, an error occur when running the 94winst.exe utility (likely related to different RAM configurations). There is also another file with different data but a later file date (1999) and content that also references a different year (1998 instead of 1997). It also has binary differences. The name in this file is HSTUD.ESS. This file is located at guillemot\6464HS\d64essn430.zip on the elianda FTP. Also, the G8500V17.BIN file found on my HDD is identical to the one in the Windows 2000 drivers (dms64sb2k100.exe).
- clean64.exe - The uninstaller. The timestamps differ: for D3D it's October 9, 1997, 12:44:16, while for 8600_2 it's October 29, 1997, 12:18:16. Internally, the registry key references differ. This doesn't affect anything.

The main difference is the INF file (GIS8600.inf), which is missing from the Dynamic 3D driver ISO. I extracted the original INF and assembled the original driver package that should have been on the card's bundled disk.

The hard drive also contained utilities, with differences in MAXIMM64:
- Files in the main folder (C:\MAXIMM64) match.
- Files in the system folder (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM) match.
- MAXI64H.INI differs.

The drive also had Quartz (Quartz AudioMaster MS64), for which only an update file (qamhs2219uk.exe) is available on the FTP; I couldn't find the main installation file. I repacked all found utilities, including Quartz, into a separate installer (MaxiSound64HomeStudioPro.exe) based on the INSTALL.LOG found on my old HDD. This installer is included in the archive.

Here's my procedure for installing drivers and utilities with all updates (Windows 98SE):
- Install drivers for all three devices via Device Manager, pointing to the Drivers/Install folder.
- Reboot. After rebooting, resolve any IRQ/DMA conflicts if they appear.
- Install driver updates (Drivers/Update/d64ess9xu13.exe). I'm not sure how necessary they are, but still.
- Copy the file from Drivers/firmware_nt/g8500v17.bin (from WinNT package) to the C:\Windows folder. Optional, I didn't notice any differences, but it works.
- Everything should work now, but you can also install the utilities.
- Install utilities from the repack Utilities/MaxiSound64HomeStudioPro.exe (Maxi Memory 64, Maxi FX Home Studio, Quartz).
- Install the Quartz update from Utilities/qamhs2219uk.exe. This update includes a Mixer (Sndvol64.exe) update (1.0 -> 1.01).
- Install the Maxi Memory 64 update from Utilities/mem6411/ram643.exe. Optional.
- You also can install the DTS -> 94B bank conversion utilities from Utilities/Maxi64.EXE.

For DOS drivers, you can use the installer from the Dynamic 3D ISO.

Windows 2000/XP drivers from the FTP work perfectly for me (dms64sb2k100.exe). You can also try to install p64ess-2k-100.exe, this file contains some utilities.

All files, except GIS8600.inf and the original utilities (MaxiSound64HomeStudioPro.exe), are available on the elianda FTP. I included these to have everything consolidated in one place.
Thanks to the community for the support—I hope this info helps others.

Thanks, nice dive into the drivers.

Now that is real software archaeology

BTW it turns out my card has a defective ESS chip.
Since that contains the mixer, no output.

Now if I was able to solder like a normal person, I'd just transplant one from a donor cheapo ESS card, but due to some health issues I have hand tremors that make it impossible.
I won't throw the card away, hoping that maybe some day there's another medication for me that allows for regular fine motor skills.