It was Ensoniqs last sound card product before they were acquired by Creative Technology.

Es1371 Windows 3.1 Full Of Features

Whereas the Soundscape line had been made up primarily of low-volume high-end products full of features, the AudioPCI was designed to be a very simple, low-cost product to appeal to system OEMs and thus hopefully sell in mass quantities.

Their cards were very popular with PC OEMs, but their costs were too high and their musical instrument division was fading in revenue.

In comparison to the wide variety of chips on and sheer size of the older Soundscape boards, the highly integrated two chip design of the AudioPCI is an obvious shift in design philosophy.

The board consists only of a very small software-driven audio chip (one of the following: S5016, ES1370, ES 1371) and a companion digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

In another cost-cutting move, the previously typical ROM chip used for storage of samples for sample-based synthesis was replaced with the facility to use system RAM as storage for this audio data.

This was made possible by the move to the PCI bus, with its far greater bandwidth and more efficient bus mastering interface when compared to the older ISA bus standard.

It offers many of the audio capabilities of the Soundscape ELITE card, including several digital effects ( reverb, chorus, and spatial enhancement ) when used with Microsoft Windows 95 and later versions of Windows.

The 4-speaker mode is only activated by software supporting the DirectSound3D quadraphonic mode.

An oddity is that the rear channel was connected to the same output jack as line input.

Several patch set choices are available, varying in size and instrument quality (2, 4, or 8 MB ).

It was particularly unfortunate because the AudioPCI used system RAM for patch set storage which in itself offers tremendous potential for new patch sets over the traditional ROM storage previously used.

Es1371 Windows 3.1 Drivers For The

It is also disappointing considering the incredible popularity and longevity of the Ensoniq ES1370 chipset and its descendants, some of which were still in use six years after the original AudioPCI board, and the fact that DOS drivers for the far newer Sound Blaster Audigy still use.ecw wave sets.

These newer cards are unable to use SoundFonts in DOS, limiting them to the three official.ecw wavesets from the late 90s and one incomplete unofficial waveset.

This driver virtualized a Sound Blaster -compatible ISA sound card through the use of the PCs NMI and a TSR program.

This allowed the AudioPCI to have more compatible out-of-the-box DOS support than some of its PCI competitors for the time.

Creative was struggling with the challenge of legacy support as well, and had created the SB-Link, an interconnect that allowed access to the serial- IRQ and PCPCI grantrequest sideband signals offered by some PCI chipsets of the time, in order to achieve DOS compatibility for their Sound Blaster AWE64 -variant PCI sound cards.

SB-Link was also used by a number of other chipset vendors, such as ESS and Yamaha.

This mode allowed fast, direct access to the systems entire RAM without requiring a memory manager or memory protection mechanism.

This is not a requirement exclusive to AudioPCI, however, as a number of ISA sound cards used it as well, including the Creative AWE ISA series.

However, without actual hardware for FM synthesis, FM music and sound effects were simulated using samples, often with unacceptable results.

Therefore, it was practical to configure DOS games to utilize the General MIDI synthesizer and digital sound effects, whenever possible, for better sound quality.

DOS MIDI utilizes the same.ecw patch set files as Windows MIDI.

Creative added Sound Blaster 16 emulation to the driver and removed the Ensoniq SoundScape support.