Got the wrong driver. maybe?

Solved! There appears to be a fault with the soundcard's capacitors. I think they are called capacitors. They are blue in colour, about 8 of them, and they all look kind of "worn out" looking. I think they need replacing. There's even an article on terratec's website about them -

http://ftp.terratec.de/Audio/Maestro/3296/Hel … fikation_GB.pdf

This article mentions booting problems. That is what I am now experiencing. As luck would have it, I have a 2nd identical card to test out. I swapped out the "bad" card with a 2nd card (whose caps look in much better condition), and voila, the driver installation succeeded for the first time, I get no more booting problems, and the best thing of all, I get to hear some funky general midi tunes in my old dos games. 😀

This problem seems vaguely similar to the problems I was having with the 486 FIC mobo, because those caps looked really bad. I wonder if I could learn a new skill, by attempting to replace these caps? Can caps such as the ones found on this sound card, and also that FIC mobo, be purchased today, or are they banished to the "retro days of yore"? If I can buy them, I would like to learn desoldering and soldering skills, because I don't want to throw away my FIC board, and the "first bad" terratec 32/96 soundcard.

Please note, the link above shows a good photo of the sound card, and the purple ring highlights a cap which has gone really bad. The photo also shows the other dark blue caps dotted about on the sound card.

What a coincidence, I also stumled upon the capicator problem a few weeks ago. But in my opinion you kinda twist the actual cause. The issue the god-send Terratec document points out is not about bad quality of caps, it is about the capacity of 1 specific capacitor. On the Terratec it is C58, normally 3,3uF 16Volt. Terratec advises to replace it with a 1,0uF variant. This card works fine in my systems, so I have no need to replace it.

However, my Acer Magic S23 has the same chipset (crystal cs4232) and did give me bootup problems. Topic with image
So I decided to trace back where "Terratecs C58" is located on the acer card and found it as C92, rated 10uF 16 Volt. Replaced it with 2,2uF and that fixed it!

Leaves me to say; the Terratec Maestro 32/96 seems like a really well made card based on a great chipset. And I really appreciate them uploading this fix.
Have you found the resource settings configuration screen? It writes to an eeprom on the card to remember its settings, and it works well.

That's great you managed to fix your Acer card using that Terratec help page!! 😁

I was able to find that resource settings configuration screen when I had the working 32/96 installed, but I couldn't seem to do anything useful with the 32/96 which had the "bad cap".

I have never replaced a "bad cap" before. I am keen to learn a new skill, as I want to try and revive the 32/96 which cannot be used ATM. (Any hints & tips woud be gratefully received!)

BTW, looking at the back of the "bad 32/96" card, there is some strange goo-like substance stuck to it. I don't think this stuff is helping matters. It's dried on solid, so I'll need to soften it with some liquid-based cleaner, but I don't know what to use.

Thanks a lot for any thoughts. 😀

Check out the very nice tutorials on www.badcaps.net.
They were written for people who want to repair their mainboards from the capacitor plague years, but they apply to other devices as well.

retro games 100 wrote:

I have never replaced a "bad cap" before. I am keen to learn a new skill, as I want to try and revive the 32/96 which cannot be used ATM. (Any hints & tips woud be gratefully received!)

You will need a soldering iron. One with a reasonably fine tip. "Weller" is a well known brand here. Then a small vice or clamp to put the soundcard in.
You need pliers to pull on the capacitor you want to remove. And a proper replacement capacitor.
With one hand you gently melt the soldering joint of the capacitor legs, after which you pull the capacitor a little with the pliers. It might not get far out as the 2nd leg is still soldered too. So you have to do pull that one a bit next. Or try to heat both the joints simultaniously. Or get that copper wire that absorbes the tin and use that first.
Then once the cap. is removed you have to put a new one in. It's somewhat the same procedure. To make it easier you might wanna drill out the two holes with a very small drill, and make sure the capacitor's legs are trimmed a bit before inserting it.

That's what I do at least. Hope you get the idea.
I could also have linked to that bad caps guy site, he probably explaines this too.
http://www.badcaps.net/

No idea about the goo-like substance though....

EDIT: hey 5u3 is faster...

Thanks guys! 😁

btw...Can anyone recommend a cheap digital camera that can do close-ups reasonably well? I'd like to take a photo of the goo on the reverse side of the terratec maestro 32/96, but my current camera does not do 'macro' at all well.

Any digital camera with a macro should do the trick. Any canon, Fuji or Sony... If it has the flower symbol on it, then it will do the trick 😀 Mega pixels? Anything from 3.2 upwards...

I got the chance to test another terratec maestro 32/96 today. But this one looks in bad shape - bent pins, strange marks on the caps, general "bashed about" look to it.

After installing the drivers & software in Windows 95, I can get SoundBlaster Pro sound effects, but nothing else - no FM, no general midi.

On the photo, where it says "1", the MIDI-1 device always has a yellow ! icon next to it. On the photo, where it says "2" and "3", I try and assign those two MIDI-1 input fields some meaningful values such as 330 (I/O) & 7 or 9 (IRQ), but after a reboot, those two values are always reset back to "OFF".

I am testing this card on a UM8810PAIO rev 2.1 board (a good old 486 board), with a phoenix PnP BIOS (ver 4.04). I have the BIOS's PnP OS value set to "Yes".

Any ideas please people? 😀

retro games 100 wrote:

I got the chance to test another terratec maestro 32/96 today. But this one looks in bad shape - bent pins, strange marks on th […]
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I got the chance to test another terratec maestro 32/96 today. But this one looks in bad shape - bent pins, strange marks on the caps, general "bashed about" look to it.

After installing the drivers & software in Windows 95, I can get SoundBlaster Pro sound effects, but nothing else - no FM, no general midi.

On the photo, where it says "1", the MIDI-1 device always has a yellow ! icon next to it. On the photo, where it says "2" and "3", I try and assign those two MIDI-1 input fields some meaningful values such as 330 (I/O) & 7 or 9 (IRQ), but after a reboot, those two values are always reset back to "OFF".

I am testing this card on a UM8810PAIO rev 2.1 board (a good old 486 board), with a phoenix PnP BIOS (ver 4.04). I have the BIOS's PnP OS value set to "Yes".

Any ideas please people? 😀

Did you check/set the settings with the tool in pure DOS that changes the settigs in the cards EPROM?

I think it's called "Terratec.exe"

Follow Amigaz advice.
If you can configure the card in dos, turn the "pnp OS" option to "no".

You could also try to set the values for DMA/IRQs to legacy isa (if this is possible with this board) and look what happens.

I bought this card some time ago on ebay in its original package with a sticker on it "now plug and play!" So I wonder if there ever was a non-pnp version of this card (which would require to reserve its recources in the bios).

I changed the BIOS's "plug n play" setting back to "No", and then booted-up the machine with a bootable DOS disk in the floppy drive. When the BIOS performs its POST operations, it displays these 2 lines on the screen:

Resource Allocation failure - PnP Device Terratec Maestro 32/96
Resource Allocation failure - PnP Device CTRL

Once at the DOS prompt, I ran the configuration utility called "terratec.exe", I saw a brief message saying something like !!!FAKE PnP BIOS detected!!! (something like that), and then saw the main terratec configuration screen. I then tried the diagnostics section, and tested the WSS, but this locks up the machine. I tried changing some of the WSS resource values, such as changing IRQ 5 to IRQ 7, and I also tried changing its DMA resource values to 0 and 1, rather than the default 1 and 3, but retesting the WSS still locks up the machine.

When changing those values mentioned above, I was just picking random numbers "out of thin air". I tried running "msd" at the DOS command prompt, but DOS couldn't find this utility. I must find out what resources (IRQs and DMAs) the mobo is using, because picking random numbers for these important IRQ and DMA values is just plain stupid (of me).

Also, when I installed the Maestro software, I installed 2 different versions of the software. One was a single "windows 95" .exe, and the other installation was a 4 part DOS zip package. (All this software was downloaded from terratec's FTP maestro 32/96 folder.)

I seem to remember getting in to a nice mess with my first terratec card I tested, then after about 3 installation/uninstallations later, it magically fixed itself. Hehe.

Edit: I found "msd". I booted up with another HDD with DOS 6.22 on it, and found this utility inside the C:\DOS folder. I couldn't find it earlier, because it might not be included with Windows 95. Incidentally, if DOS has "msd", and Windows 98 has that utility called "system resources" (or whatever it's called), then what does windows 95 have, in order to examine your system's IRQ and DMA resources, etc?

There's something else a bit odd about this "clean installed" win95 installation - I can't reboot or shut down to DOS. If I try to do either of these 2 actions, I get the "It's now safe to turn off your machine" message on the screen. This message also gets displayed if an application attempts to reboot the machine.

Edit: I have removed the maestro card, and now I can successfully reboot the machine, and also restart the machine in MS-DOS mode. This "rebooting problem" may have been caused by the c:\m32\terratec.exe -I DOS initialization routine failing in some way.

I think this maestro card is damaged. The next time I dig out my one and only working maestro card, I'll install its software and get it up and running, then swap it out for this card, just to see if it works OK.

retro games 100 wrote:

Any ideas please people? 😀

yes use printscreen 😉

Davros wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

Any ideas please people? 😀

yes use printscreen 😉

hehe. good thinking. 😀