Wavetables – PRO32AW « modelrail.otenko

30Nov/170

Wavetables – PRO32AW

Whilst in Thailand I picked up an ISA card with a daughterboard. It was part of a collection of crap from a market where the SIMMs and card were rusting and .. well ... I took a punt!

Turns out the card was an ESS1868, but the daughterboard was an Avance PRO32AW! Talk about lipstick-on-a-pig! I suppose someone wanted the cheapest SB16 experience with a 'better' MIDI quality? It seems this is a clone of a AdMOS Adwave 32, down to just a simple text modification on the PCB. There's a site (Japanese) here that mentions this fact.

The Wavetable module plugs on the header on the sound card and (usually) then disables midi-out on the joystick port.

After a lot of tinkering, I worked out the following. To get a wavetable to work, you need to adjust the IDSP/ADSP jumpers.. where ADSP seems to be the additional DSP card. If you don't have jumpers (The ESS1868 didn't ... and my Vibra 16S/C also didn't), then you'll probably find a new Gameport Joystick detected when Windows loads... unfortunately, this will conflict with your original joystick port.

To correctly install a wavetable under windows, your best option is to entirely delete the soundcard from windows first! Remove everything from device manager (especially the Gameport Joystick!) and then shut the machine down. In this state, the card will be found a-new when windows loads and you shouldn't get resource conflicts. It seems that jumperless sound-cards disable the joystick output when a wavetable is added and then re-route the midi messages to the wavetable. The main confusing part was that the new 'Gameport Joystick' used the exact same addresses and resources as the conflicting port!

After getting it all to work, I managed to pass the audio through my laptop and record the output of each piece of hardware. Here's the source file from Mr Trachtman's Archive.

Here's the basic ESFM Synth:

Here's the Vibra 16 FM Synth:

And then the PRO32AW wavetable:

And then my beautiful Roland Sound Canvas SC-55.

And finally, a friend's Yamaha PSR (Thanks Nathan!)

...Muhahaha...

I found the wavetable sound to be much better than the internal FM synth on the ESS1868. I actually don't mind the wavetable when compared to the SC-55, but was definitely hoping that the SC-55 would come out on top.

I wonder how I replace the soundfonts!?