Reply 58780 of 58784, by MattRocks
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Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 18:47:This is definitely the first time I have gone out of my way to buy an Ensoniq\Creative AudioPCI, but I had the opportunity to gr […]
This is definitely the first time I have gone out of my way to buy an Ensoniq\Creative AudioPCI, but I had the opportunity to grab this interesting little fella for a low price and went for it.
(These are the seller's pictures, not mine.)While it is functionally just a normal Ensoniq AudioPCI ES1370, this one has a unique layout and was built, branded and sold by DCS as the S727. I just checked the contents of the CD and the newest files are from September 11th of 1997, which is about three months before the public announcement that Creative was going to acquire Ensoniq (the deal was done a month later in January 1998). So, for whatever reason, Ensoniq was selling chips to DCS at this point and they were making and selling their own retail boxed cards.
These seem to be fairly uncommon, with this page being one of only two pages where someone mentions having this specific card, along with a few scattered references to it on lists of sound cards online.
DCS (aka Acer, Sertek or Magitronic) seems to have had an interesting relationship with sound card companies back then, because there are a handful of cards that were sold with their branding (or Acer) that no other third parties sold. For example, the Acer Magic S30, which is based on the Vibra16. Or, this mystery card with a DCS logo that has eluded me for a few years now which seems to be a Vibra16 with Yamaha OPL4 wavetable onboard.
Anyway, I thought this was neat and I picked it up pretty cheap considering it was complete in box and seems to be unused. I have ripped the CD to an ISO and will try to get around to uploading it to Archive.org at some point.
Congrats.
I found the link you dug up really interesting and it validates a lot of my arguments in favour of the ES1370. Additionally, the linked page claims the drivers for Labway Yamaha XG are lost to time but I think the link below might be those missing drivers? (I have not tested, but the INFs mix Labway and Yamaha).
https://archive.org/details/opl3-sax
Edit: That's not the missing driver CD 🙁
Edit2: I found the Labway XWave driver CD and it's pure Yamaha XG reference drivers - there was no Labway modified driver file
[ MOS 7501 → 68030 → x86(P5/MMX) → x86(K6-2) → x86(K7*) → PPC(G3*) → x86-64(K8) → x86-64(Xeon) → x86-64(i5) → x86-64(i7) ] *reconstructed
