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First post, by DoomSlinger

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Ok, I have been trying for days now to get an ES1869F audio drive, which has been integrated into the motherboard, working with DOS. When using the card through win 98se, it works fine. In dos, however, I cannot get it to play music for any game unless it plays it directly from a CD (with 2 exceptions). I have tried running the ESSCFG program included with the driver download here on vogons (in fact I tried both the 1868 and 1869 versions), did not work and even disabled the internal speaker. I have also tried running unisound to configure the card, and it didn't even detect it. Normal sound effects work fine, it is just music. I have swapped the IRQ between 5 and 7 and neither worked. Music plays fine when running games through the MS-DOS prompt in win 98.

Games I've tried:
Hexen - Music will only play when read directly from the cd, unless game is run through win 98.
Kings quest 4 - audio worked fine, but it's running with IBM onboard speaker, and won't use my external speakers (pretty sure it doesn't support external speakers, but I'm not sure.)
Kings Quest 6 - Music plays when playing in win 98 mode, but the narrator won't talk. Opposite happens in dos mode
Space Quest 5 - Same as with KQ6, but any sound effect that is equivalent to the narration doesn't work in 98 mode, games also hangs when it tries to play some of these sounds in 98 mode.
Space Quest 4 - Music only plays when the game is setup to use Adlib, this is the ONLY game that adlib fixes the no audio issue. Works fine with win 98
Space Quest 1 VGA - No sound at all unless played through win 98

The other specs on this pc:
Pentium III 542 MHZ
640 MB of Ram
Nvidia TnT2 GPU (Viper 770U)

Dual boot system with Win 98se and Dos

If anyone has even the slightest idea on how to fix this problem, I'd be down to hear it, but at this point I have no idea how to fix this issue.

EDIT: SOLVED

I found out that after disabling the soundcard in the bios and running ESSCFG, it worked. The only change I noticed is that ESSCFG set DMA1 to 3, where as the bios would only let me set it to 0.

Last edited by DoomSlinger on 2021-04-15, 16:38. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 12, by Cyberdyne

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ESS Audiodrive cards are usually hassle free with all DOS games, just use pure DOS and ESSSET and ESSVOL. If I am not using an AWE32 or a GUS, then it is usually ES1869(not ES1868) based card, I really like the added 3D effects, and you can adjust them from pure DOS.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 4 of 12, by DoomSlinger

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Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-04-15, 05:22:

ESS Audiodrive cards are usually hassle free with all DOS games, just use pure DOS and ESSSET and ESSVOL. If I am not using an AWE32 or a GUS, then it is usually ES1869(not ES1868) based card, I really like the added 3D effects, and you can adjust them from pure DOS.

ESSET? I've seen esscfg and essvol, but have not found esset

Reply 5 of 12, by Cyberdyne

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Sorry yes ESSCFG.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 7 of 12, by Cyberdyne

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ESSCFG.EXE /A:220 /I:5 /D:1 /B:300 /J:D

What does it say?

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.

Reply 8 of 12, by DoomSlinger

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Bios settings and what dos says after running esscfg and essvol (or rather the go.bat file that came with the driver here on vogons)

Edit: Noticed it's a little fuzzy, the audio line says IO:220h IRQ:7 DMA0:1 DMA1: 0 MPU401: 330h

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Reply 9 of 12, by Hezus

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I vaguely recall an ESS card that would also not work with the older version of ESSCFG that I had. Then I found a slightly newer version and it worked. You might want to check that. I can't recall the version numbers though.

Visit my YT Channel!

Reply 11 of 12, by Pierre32

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DoomSlinger wrote on 2021-04-15, 10:55:

is esscfg supposed to keep running after it's run for the first time? It doesn't show up when I type in mem /c.

Nope, it's a one time initialisation, not a TSR.

Reply 12 of 12, by DoomSlinger

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I finally got it to work! In order for dos games to play music, I had to completely disable the card in the bios, then I ran the ESSCFG. Now adlib works for every game when running in dos. The only difference I found was that the bios would not let me set my dma1 to 3, it kept defaulting to 0. This fixed the issue, and if I can figure out how to get the bios to set that up properly, I probably won't even need to run esscfg

Edit: Cannot change that in the bios. IDK why, but it won't let me set dma1 to 3. Oh well, will just setup esscfg to auto run at start.