Record some songs 😀
Also, picture from inside please.

Interesting... Nice find btw
Stojke is correct, we need some inside pics and some recordings, the gm-fixed dooms are a good candidate to record from IMHO

GM is a mapping of samples for standardized replay. So the only way to find out is to play GM MIDI files and find out. 😀 Looks like a SC-7 knock off to me.

thanks guys...I am working through the weekend so I don't know if I will have time to set up my system to record sounds anytime soon, but when I make time (hopefully by next week) to do so, I will hook up this Kaysound unit and my SC-7 as well and do some comparison recordings and upload.

here are some pics of the inside:

Looks like an "MX" chip in there and then some samsung chip too...it's all totally out of my realm of understanding... 😕 , but the construction of this thing is actually seems to be of high quality despite it looking like a 'knock off'.

A cool feature is the demo mode as well that plays a little GM song when it's all hooked up.

That looks like a Dream chipset with SAMxxxx marking under the sticker (not "Samsung" btw). I guess the next request would be... peel that red sticker off! (please) 🤣

The GMS940800 is a 1 MB ROM soundfont used with older Dream hardware.
I am not sure which kind it is, usually GMS96xxxx is Roland and GMS97xxxx are Cleanwave.

Might be a SAM9407 ?!?

archsan wrote:

That looks like a Dream chipset with SAMxxxx marking under the sticker (not "Samsung" btw). I guess the next request would be... peel that red sticker off! (please) 🤣

🤣 ...I should have done that in the first place. The "Samsung" chip now says "SAM9233" 🤣 and removing the white label off the MX chip revealed some more info as well...

Thanks to everyone for the great info....now I at least know a bit more about this 'weird' sound module. If you know anything else about it, please share.

Gah... I was going to put my guess on 9233 🤣 -- by the number below that "9539" -- because after racing to google images I found at this page
http://www.amoretro.de/2011/09/terratec-maest … -soundcard.html
see "9541" there, so i guess it's some kind of batch number...(or product number/global revision number)?
Anyway it should sound similar to Terratec Maestro 32/96 then!

Very cool...I have always wanted a Terratec Maestro 32/96! 🤣 But of course this is not nearly as good, but at least I have a part of a Terratec Maestro 32/96 I guess. 🤣

Great find on the picture BTW...thanks for the info.

Unfortunately the module will sound nowhere near the Maestro 32/96. The synth is the same, it's the SAM9233. But the module lacks an effects processor and only has 1MB of ROM instead of the 4MB ROM used on the higher quality boards.

Oh well... I was just going to say to retrofanatic that the owner of that site is probably on vogons and would definitely know more about this stuff.

Btw, great site FGB! Good job on the photography as well. 😀

what I can add to this is that the MX27C1000 is a 128kbyte eeprom , most likely holding the device's firmware along with that demo song mode.

FGB wrote:

Unfortunately the module will sound nowhere near the Maestro 32/96. The synth is the same, it's the SAM9233. But the module lacks an effects processor and only has 1MB of ROM instead of the 4MB ROM used on the higher quality boards.

In this case it's more like a SC8600 (Maxi Sound Home Studio) in a box 😵 Will definitely not compare to a SC 7 or SCB 7 but it's a strange device for sure 🤣

This comparison is a bit off, since the SC8600 cards have a Dream SAM9407 and upgradeable RAM up to 16 MB. This is the same Dream DSP used on Terratec EWS64 cards. With those cards you can load the Roland soundfont

My bad, I thought that the SC8600 used the SAM9233. 😊 It's been a while since I last used it 🤣

Quality isn't only up to the synth chip. Many cards are based on the SAM9233 synth but they differ in the quality of the music. This is because the synth has to be fed by a soundfont stored in a ROM or RAM and thus the soundfonts size has a massive impact on the sound quality. Im most cases the bigger the soundfont / ROM size the better the quality of the samples stored inside (of course there are exceptions like 4MB soundfont compressed to 2MB and such).

The Maxisound 64 HSP (ESS codec based) card mentioned above is usually fed by the 4MB Roland Sound Canvas soundfont but has the ability to use other compatible (even larger) soundfonts via the RAM upload technology (like Elianda mentioned). But there is another MaxiSound 64 card (Crystal codec based model, SC8500, IMO the better of the two models) that has the 4MB Roland soundfont in ROM and the additional possibility to load another soundfont into the RAM or even attach a daughterboard to the card.

@archsan: Thank you very much!

I don't rememmber what was my SC8600 default rom size and I never managed to get soundfont into the ram working (very frustrating to make it fully work into dos, never tested it in windows)... At that time my first reaction was to blame both the synth and default samples quality, because even by disabling internal amplifier, using the line out, shut non used lines and tweak the mixer for hours it always sounded like sh.. (both in GM and OPL3 emu) compared to my SB16/SCB 7 combo 😒 ... very bad experience for me, never touched it again in 3 years 🤣

Edit :
Sure using it as a Wavetable header was the really interesting thing for me, because of the low noize ratio when setting up correctly (but opl3 emu screw it up when combinig the two in games). That the only positive point that i can truly acquiesce.

The SC8600 has no ROM, its RAM based. But there is an easy tutorial how to load any compatible (.94B) soundfont in pure DOS, made by my fellow countryman Elianda. Here you go: Guillemot Maxi Sound home studio 64 pro - no music in pure DOS Give it a try, some soundbanks sound really nice 😀 However there is no solution to load a soundfont in DOS with the SC8500 model yet (but this card has the 4MB Roland soundfont in ROM.).

😀 Thanks for the link, I will maybe give it a try again. If i remmenber correctly the 9m soundfont sounded very nice in some recordings. I tried to force 9m soundfont by renaming it like the default one at that time 🤣