Correction - it's a Midia Sound 2000 SB card. Photo below. Anyone heard of these things?

Are you sure the brand is Analog Devices? I think maybe they just made the DAC chip because I can't find any mention of sound cards on their web site.

I bought an MT-32 and SC-88 from eBay for playing old games in DOSBox :p

I think perhaps the company is called Midia? I have managed to obtain the blurb on the back of the box...

retro games 100: if the description tells the truth. Then I would say you have gotten hold of a good old soundcard , but I could be wrong.

'Magic Midia' from Germany made some soundcards. Yours obviously has an AD1848 codec and also a 'Breve'? ISA interface chip. The AD1848 usually means WSS compatibility, any other compatibility must be handled by the Breve chip. I read SoundBlaster is mentioned, but SoundBlaster Pro stereo is not? I wonder what takes care of the FM, maybe there is a genuine OPL3 hidden beneath the DB. The DB is said to be 8MB, which is suprisingly big. I am curious as to what chipset the wavetable has.

My badass soundcard [Midia Sound 2000 SB] arrived today, but it's possible I may need a (DOS) driver to hear any tunes from it. I tried running setup.exe inside the Shadow Warrior demo, to test out the music - it can "see" the General Midi @330 music option OK, but I cannot hear any music on my headphones.

Perhaps I either need a DOS driver to be loaded in to memory, or I need some kind of "initialisation" application to "activate" the soundcard.

I did a quick google for Midia Sound 2000, and I also checked out DriverGuide.com, but so far I haven't been able to spot anything appropriate.

Google 'AD1848 breve' or something. The breve chip is the main interface, the important chip. here is something: something [Edit : Nevermind this link, it does not contain what it should. Looking further I must say; this is a though one, hardly any references on the internet...]

Concerning the wavetable: On second thought I suspect they mean 8 MegaBit, thus 1 MegaByte.
Maybe you can make another picture so I can see the other chips?

gerwin wrote:

Concerning the wavetable: On second thought I suspect they mean 8 MegaBit, thus 1 MegaByte.
Maybe you can make another picture so I can see the other chips?

Regarding the onboard wavetable capacity, it's interesting to note that the box's blurb says -

PCM samples of 16 bit 44.1 kHs
317 sounds in 8 MB PCM synthesis wave table
128 General MIDI instruments plus multiple drumsets and variations

I think that sounds "badass" enough to be more than 1 meg.

Regarding further photos of the board, please see below. The 2nd close-up photo is the underside of the daughterboard attachment.

I put the soundcard inside a socket 7 board, then booted up with windows 98. It can find the card OK (when I chose to manually add hardware), and it installs the following devices (found inside the system control panel) -

Gameport Joystick
Roland MPU-401 compatible
MS Windows sound system compatible
Sound blaster or compatible
Windows sound system sound blaster emulation

Unfortunately however, all my dxdiag.exe tests fail - both for sound effects and music. I just hear silence in my headphones.

Using 'breve bs3393k' in google I get some promising results, I think you are saved!

Awesome, thanks! I notice there is an "uploader comment" next to the downloadable breve.zip file (on driverguide.com), stating that it doesn't work too well on Windows 98. I'm currently using that OS, but ATM, I'm trying out the DOS software. I can get most of these apps to run (including a couple of "initialisation" apps), but still I cannot hear a single note from the soundcard.

I'm now trying a different approach - it's possible that the headphone jack has blown. So, I've plugged in a pair of amplified multimedia speakers in to the next output port on the card, labelled "line out".

I will continue with my testing........

And the DOS driver from www.pc-schnulli.de , does that one work?

gerwin wrote:

And the DOS driver from www.pc-schnulli.de , does that one work?

I just DL'd that package. It appears to be identical to the breve.zip package available on driverguide.com

Anyway, I've had some interesting results. Inside DOS, I've managed to get both a wav file to play, and also a midi file to play. But the midi playback sounded a bit strange, and so I decided to run setup.exe inside Descent 2, for some further experiments. I tested the general midi test tune, and the best way to describe the problem is as follows -

You know pop music has multiple tracks. 1 track is for drums, another track is for bass, etc etc. Well, listening to the Descent 2 demo tune, at least 1 of its tracks was not exactly "in sync" with all of the other tracks. It sounded as if one (possibly more) track(s) was "dragging its heals" a little bit, and not keeping up in time with all of the other tracks. Some kind of timing issue, maybe?

I've switched over to a HDD formatted with DOS 6.22, to get away from the potential troublesome windows 98. I'm using a socket 7 board, with a Pentium MMX, 166 speed. Who knows, perhaps I ought to run this thing on something either slower or faster?

Or...perhaps there's some kind of "delay effect" being applied, that I need to switch off in a mixer app.

I tested doom shareware version 1.9 on this soundcard, and also on another soundcard (roland mpu-401AT with creative waveblaster 2 DB). When you run the shareware game, and watch the demo, the music you hear (on a soundcard which is working correctly) initially comes out of the right speaker only, then the sinister sounding synth notes comes from both right and left speaker. On the analog devices card, the sinister sounding synth music is only heard from the right speaker.

I think the problem is that the left speaker music is not being output properly. This could be a mixer problem, but the mixer.exe program supplied in the breve.zip package doesn't seem to help with this specific issue. It's also interesting to note that the volume wheel on the back of the card seems to have no effect -- (now where have I had that problem before? I'm sure I've had that on another soundcard, then managed to fix that particular issue.)

It is possible to hear music coming from the left speaker, but it seems to be intermittent. This could explain why some of the descent 2 test music sounded a bit "laggy" in places - where the music notes should be heard from the left speaker, instead these notes may be "missing" from this left channel.

Incidentally, you may be right about the 1meg wavetable - after all, the wavetable is really quite tiny, and it doesn't sound all that great to be honest.

I've got the headphone port working, and I've also got the volume wheel working. But the bad news is that the midi playback still sounds odd. I tried one of the breve.zip utilities called usm.exe - something sound manager, I think. It's a kind of demo showcase, and in it, there's an option to play a midi tune. When you play it, it's like a band who've all been given intruments to play, and then got drunk, and subsequently they are all slightly out of sync with each other. It's weird. Perhaps I need the absolute specific driver package for this card, and the breve.zip package is not quite the right software for it? Also, when I run game related setsound utilites, the demo tunes sound like they are missing some notes. Most of it sounds OK, but some of it sounds incomplete.