VOGONS


First post, by Jolaes76

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I screwed this up royally. Forgot to take out other cards when rewriting eeprom and I ended up with a busted maestro 32/96. And an ews XL!!! I wrote maestro fw to both cards :'( neither can initialize now.
Anyone please with either cards help. Dump the eeprom if you can with crystal resource utility or other tools for me. Big thanks in advance!

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 2 of 14, by Jolaes76

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Thank you very much!

Could you please tell the exact command parameters (for resource.exe) to upload the asm to the card? Do I first need to convert this asm file to another format (ini) ?
Or I simply launch resource.exe and fiddle with the menu items...?

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 3 of 14, by gerwin

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Currently I don't have any way to test the procedure on vintage hardware.
But from memory:
-Start resource.exe
-Read eeprom data from file -> type 'Maestro.asm'
-Write eeprom data to card
Done. 😀

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 4 of 14, by Jolaes76

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Worked!
The codec can initialize by cs4232c.exe, cs4232cfg.exe. Not with Terratec.exe, though. (give strange memory area errors). I will figure out the correct lines for config.sys or autoexec.bat and test the card.

I hope someone can dump some info from an EWS64XL rev 1.2, too. Rev 1.0 might be OK as well. For a start, that is.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 5 of 14, by Stojke

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You need to Override the PnP settings for Maestro. That dump and Override helped me get the thing to work.
I used to have an EWS64 XL, maybe you can ask the person I sold it to.

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Reply 6 of 14, by Jolaes76

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Is he a forum member here or any major retro sites where I can reach him?

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 7 of 14, by Stojke

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You can find him on Amibay, his nickname is Puny. He bought it recently so he might not have installed it yet. Hopefully he will help you 😀

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Reply 8 of 14, by Jolaes76

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Thanks! I am checking in right now 😀

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 9 of 14, by Jolaes76

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I forgot I cannot yet send PMs over there. Sent you a PM instead, Stojke...

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 11 of 14, by Jolaes76

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I just want to report that I managed to revive both the Maestro and EWS64 XL, thanks to forum members gerwin, stojke and elianda.

The solution for the Maestro was a single EEPROM reprogramming and re-init. (with overriding PnP configuration as suggested, forcing all settings from file instead)

The EWS64 took at least 4 EEPROM reprogrammings (I don't have the slightest idea why) and it had to be isolated as a single sound card in a bare system with only a video card as company. But in the end, it could successfully initialize codec, synth, MPU401... with native utilities (ewsmixer, ewsinit, ewscfg)

The only issue that remains is quite a mystery - the card is not enumerated at POST anymore as an EWS64 XL but as a simple "PnP card". It is sort of cosmetic, and I might be able to amend it as elianda has already dumped the EEPROM/ROM contents from a working EWS64 XL for me (big thanks!)

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 12 of 14, by gerwin

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That is good news!

The post screen identification: I think is just states the name in the PnP info table. I quote from these files:
MAESTRO.ASM = 'TerraTec Maestro 32/96'
CSMODDED.ASM = 'CS4232 Sound Card'
PCA70PS.ASM = 'Philips PCA70PS'

Can you share the EWS64 specific file(s) here please?

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 13 of 14, by Jolaes76

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OK, here they are.
But these are in a different file type, the dump was not done by resource.exe so I am still thinking about how to convert it to .asm

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 14 of 14, by gerwin

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Thanks. 😀
The .asm files I gathered, were created by the resource utility, after reading the information from the soundcard.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul