Is the ESS Audiodrive the BEST DOS Sound Card!? (ES1869)

[@Vanessaira-Retro]

Had ESS in my Compaq Persario 528 CDTV and it sounded pretty awesome. Very similar to this. Great video as always.

[@RetroTinkerer]

Hi, did yours had the 1868 or the 1869? I'm just about to pick up one with the 1869. 😊 It looks identical to the one he is showing in the video.

[@jbinary82]

hehehe did I inspired you with my comment? A very nice sound card. I used SOLO1 PCI in my (spanish) video and it also works incredible, even better.

[@lordwiadro83]

Can you provide a link to your video? I bought a Solo-1 recently but haven't tested it yet. I already have an ESS ISA card in one PC, and I am happy with it, but I also have another PC that only has PCI slots.

[@jbinary82]

@@lordwiadro83 I didn't want to spam my channel, only if DosStorm allows me to do it (it's in my profile anyway)

[@DOSStorm]

I'm still on the lookout for one of those cards. Although I think I have a laptop with one.

[@VolfMark]

I had sn ISA sound card with the ESS audio chip, I think it was model 1688. It worked great in DOS, it even came with a DOS driver to configure the base address, IRQ and all that. I especially liked that voice in Windows audio rack when you clicked on the logo and it said "Audio drive". 😊

[@Shmbler]

I believe this was one of the cards that even worked in an 8 bit slot on my PC1512 XT (with UNISOUND). Great chip, and this Compaq model is so common that I involuntarily own a couple of them. Also works flawless in Win98 out of the box, other than some of my SB16 PNP.

[@DOSStorm]

For ease of use it's amazing. Blessed be the guy who made the Unisound driver, that thing makes cards that were really a pain to setup really simple these days.

[@Rouxenator]

Loved my ES1688 back in the day. Bought it new for a fraction of the price a friend of mine paid for a GUS, and the ESS had far less issues with Sound Blaster compatibility in DOS. The ES1688 came with ESFM which was good enough. This ES1869 is way cooler.

[@DOSStorm]

I agree. The GUS is a great card for musicians or games that support it, but its fussy to get working and the OPL implementation is awful. ESS cards just work and always sound pretty good. I don't think it is quite up to par with an SB Pro or SB16 for DOS games but it certainly is very serviceable.

[@B24Fox]

The CMI8330 is a perfect 1-to-1 clone of the OPL3, does ADPCM in DOS, no hanging note bug, no DMA clicking, VERY good SBpro2 & SB16 compatibility, and also does WSS in DOS. Drivers are also great in both Windows and DOS; so dosgames run fine in both. Can also be found integrated on some motherboards (especially PCchips), and will be mislabeled as "SoundPro PCI HT1869V+". It also plays nice in most dosgames alongside an Audigy 1 or 2; so you can have perfect OPL and hardware MIDI simultaneously in both DOS and Windows... with the added bonus of EAX and MIDI SoundFonts in Windows :)

[@mkastelovic]

Very good card actually for the retromachine in dos. I have also the 1869F, that 3d sound is quite interesting one. In comparison with Soundblaster it's a little bit different sound, however, still really good card. And even in these days, cheep one.

[@DOSStorm]

Yeah it seems in general to be a slightly higher pitch than the SB cards and its obviously not a perfect representation of the real OPL chips. I feel like it is probably the best as far as embedded solutions that aren't using real Yamaha chips. It certainly is more accurate than the Analog Devices or at least some of the Crystal stuff.

[@weegeesoul]

i never thought I'd hear Children of Bodom in a DOS soundcard review.

[@Pickle136]

yeah i have a number of ess cards and i dont think you can wrong with any of them. Best combo: ess1869 with e-wave from serda. Also check out warcraft 2 has specific esfm support.

[@DOSStorm]

Yeah they are all pretty solid in my experience, and they just sound good to me since I grew up with Compaq machines which always seemed to have them. Even the embedded ones are pretty good, albeit a bit noisy.

[@CYON4D]

Cowbell strikes again :D Nice card!

[@DOSStorm]

Duke always needs more cowbell!

[@computergamingyesterday]

Very helpful, thanks

[@LeeMc007]

I love the ESS cards, so easy to setup and mostly sound great, I recently came across a tiny little ess card with onboard midi and a 1mb rom, sounds absolutely amazing and i got it for £5 so an absolute bargain, no idea who makes it, the only thing on the card is 233X, any ideas?

[@DOSStorm]

Not sure, I do know there are quite a few of them that are just really generic and unbranded.

[@mOddEdLiKeHeLL]

i have the 230X and its made by a company called Pine. PT-230X

[@arphaksad01]

I've been trying to get some of these old DOS games to play on my Win95 PC but so far no luck. Where can I get Duken Nukem 2 and other old DOS games?

[@DOSStorm]

You can get them on archive.org. I think the only place to legally obtain Duke Nukem 2 digitally these days is Zoom Platform.

[@fermitupoupon1754]

Looking at prices these days, I'm so glad I never threw out my GUS or MT-32. Meanwhile my retro PC is kind of a frankenstein build. P2-350 256MB RAM, GeForce 2 GTS, 2x Voodoo 2 in SLI, GUS, MT-32 and it's hooked up to a tower with 14 SCSI 4x speed CDROM drives. Data that doesn't live on CDROM is stored on 4 CF cards, because at the time that was easier than sourcing decent IDE drives.

[@lordwiadro83]

Your Pentium 2-350 is not a bottleneck for the Voodoo 2 in SLI? I have a similar system but my CPU is a Pentium 2-333. It is a bottleneck, for example Unreal Tournament runs poorly on it.

[@DOSStorm]

Yeah you did good there! That sounds like a great setup to me, but also quite a bit of work to configure properly.

[@fermitupoupon1754]

@@lordwiadro83 That might be due to the 66MHz FSB on the 333, vs 100MHz on 350. I was never much of a UT kid back then, but Quake runs beautifully on it. So does NFS2SE, Roll Cage Stage 2, Carmageddon. Though to be fair, if the performance on the Voodoo's isn't good, like say in MDK2, then I do just use the GF2GTS, which is an absolute powerhouse for the era.

[@fermitupoupon1754]

@@DOSStorm The biggest headache is solved by the SCSI card presenting all of the CDROM drives as if they were read-only HDD volumes. The sound cards and video cards are surprisingly friendly with one another. I expected it to be more of an issue, but it just sort of worked. Some games yes, especially DOS4GW can be a pita. But mostly it just works. Get SFX over the GUS and Midi music over the MT32. Both go into a budget mixer panel and then into an old amp and speakers.

[@lordwiadro83]

@fermitupoupon1754 Yes, Quake and Quake II run very well on a P2 333. In fact, Quake runs at 150 fps in 640x480, and 70 fps in 1024x768 (I have a V2 SLI). It is with the 1999 games that I see a serious slowdown.

[@timneumann7184]

It sounds good to me but I wear hearing aids so take that for what it's worth!😁 Off topic but what model is that apple crt? The picture looks excellent didn't know you could hook them up to a pc.

[@DOSStorm]

Yeah I think it sounds pretty good for a cheap card. As for the monitor it works great but you do need a VGA adapter which you can find on eBay for around $15.

[@fft2020]

More cowbell please!

[@nrg753]

I've got two 1868s and a 1869. Not sure what the difference is. Seriously great cards though!. They also work well with the roland gm midi built in to 98.

[@DOSStorm]

Does the 1868 have the 3D sound thing? I know the 1869 has some enhancements but they are very similar especially for DOS games.

[@seandubois86]

How are you able to do General MIDI from Duke3D. Is that a source port that uses Windows Sound System?

[@seandubois86]

I have a ESS 1868 and it does the software MIDI in Windows. I would love to be able to use it with DOS Games 😢

[@DOSStorm]

Sorry if it seemed confusing. For Duke 3D all you need to do is use the WaveBlaster option to use the wave table.

[@summerlaverdure]

its not the best card but i like it 😍 great video

[@DOSStorm]

Thanks!

[@dosnostalgic]

Great cards, but not great OPL approximation is a shame.

[@lordwiadro83]

Not a shame, actually it is very close to OPL. Growing up with ESS, I prefer it.

[@dosnostalgic]

@@lordwiadro83 That's called a personal preference. It is, of course, better than some other implementations, but it's definitely not *very* close if you're *very* familiar with OPL2/3.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

@@dosnostalgic - yes not identical - but I grew up with ESS cards too. Far later on I got an Awe32 and I used to switch to the OPL3 from the wavetable for certain games because I wanted the sound I grew up with. It was different enough to make me yearn for the ESS lol

[@DOSStorm]

Yeah it's not 100% accurate but it is about as close as it gets for embedded solutions IMHO. It certainly is much better than Creative's "emulation" efforts during the late 90s with the live and PCI SB16 cards.

[@dosnostalgic]

@@DOSStorm Idk, I feel like Crystal stuff is closer than ESS. And, of course, there are also single chip Yamaha stuff that's exact.

[@mibnsharpals]

It may be due to the recording, but the card sounds muffled and the treble is missing.

[@DOSStorm]

Interesting. I didn't add any EQ or comp, I just volume matched them(since each game varies in volume) and it was recorded directly to my TASCAM DR-05. The sound effects are probably a bit to loud on on some of the games which probably doesn't help.

[@mibnsharpals]

@@DOSStorm The maps vary a bit when it comes to heights. Personally, I like those that prefer the highs a little and sound more transparent. That's why I like the old SB16 too.

[@DOSStorm]

@@mibnsharpals I would definitely agree that the SB16 sounds better than this.

[@jimmccalb4458]

Well It out lasted my $200 dollar sound blaster 16 from the dark ages of the 90's.

[@Jay-q3o4w]

Damn it, I have 2 Compaq computers of the same family, and they both have some problems.

[@MrWoodward42]

The Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) or the GUS Max was the best DOS sound card. Hands down.

[@mkastelovic]

Actually if you don't mind, I don't agree. I had my own experiences. HW was put down by it's software. So much troubles with emaulation of SB and Adlib ... If the game has directly supported the Gravis card, it was a nice sound, if not and you had to use the SB emulation, it was a tragic situation. Avoid if you not intend to use it only with games after 94.

[@mibnsharpals]

if the game supports it. But the card shown can be had for extremely little money.

[@DOSStorm]

I like the GUS but it's OP2/3 implementation is abysmal. For games that directly support it is freaking amazing though. One Must Fall never sounded better.

[@mibnsharpals]

@@DOSStorm Yes, it was terrible, so it was always good to have an original Adlib installed and then connect it via the mixer input. The additional costs were small compared to what the card cost.

[@idahofur]

Yea the set blaster command and misc. depending on card say .sys driver was needed. Sometimes it was to set the plug n play for dos. So the dos games would find the card. If you go back even farther before plug n play. Some of the great clones would even run sound blaster software. Though, from my understanding creative labs changed that. Job security on dos and job security on windows before all the bugs was worked out. Even remember a few sound cards not compatible with windows or the mfg. just didn't bother releasing a driver for windows 3.1 or mostly 95.

[@edsiefker1301]

No, that's the Audacity. But the ESS competes well!

[@solarix]

Purple????

[@DOSStorm]

Ok....Maybe its blue. It is kinda purple though.

[@the_kombinator]

They're not bad - no wavetable header and CDROM pinouts, so yeah not super useful outside of just making decent sound.

[@Pickle136]

my 1869 has them, just depends which card maker you get

[@mkastelovic]

I have the wave table header on my 1869F, maybe it depends on the company which made the card?

[@neppy-chan9297]

They can have them. I have an 1868 with both, and an 1869 with a Waveblaster header.

[@the_kombinator]

@@neppy-chan9297 They can, I have one running a Panasonic 2x. Still, I'd have to be pretty desperate to put a Compaq OE sound card into even the crappiest retro PC I own.

[@the_kombinator]

@@Pickle136 Yes I know, and I'm not surprised Compaq omitted all those options. I have maybe a dozen ESS cards around my shop and in computers, this has to be the worst example of one. It's like reviewing a car and then selecting the most pov spec'd one with rust on it for a subject.

[@davidp4456]

They aint cheap anymore

[@davejones1621]

Would have been helpful if you went through the driver installation step by step, instead of just clicking on what you done and achieved.

[@DOSStorm]

The drivers are pretty simple for this one! All you need to do is install it directly from device manager in Windows. If you want to use it in DOS, just add the SET BLASTER variables to the autoexec and load the Unisound driver. I used SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4. You can change the IRQs/DMAs just make sure to use T4 so it is detected as an SBPRO.

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

No