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ES1869F + ES689F Wavetable

I have no idea who actually manufactured this card, but this is a good one. The ESS AudioDrive chipsets are well known to be very nice and low hassle Sound Blaster Pro 2 clones. This particular one has a built in wavetable chip, which is a bit harder to find. The AudioDrives typically just have the main ES18## chip along with a wavetable header.

The wavetable is handled by two chips: The ES689F is a 32 voice MIDI synthesize and the ES981 is a 1 MB ROM chip.

Installation

Installation is easy. All you need is a copy of the ESSCFG.EXE and ESSVOL.EXE utilities. ESSCFG is used to initialize the card and ESSVOL is used to adjust the mixer settings. Nothing stays loaded in RAM after ESSCFG runs.

User Guide for ESSCFG.EXE and ESSVOL.EXE

One caveat that I found was that you need to make sure to use a version of ESSCFG that is compatible with the 1869F. I originally tried to use a copy that I had used for my 1868F card (V4.3). The digitial audio and MIDI would initialize, but the FM would not. I ended up downloading this driver pack from Vogons and using the one that specifically said it worked with 1869 cards (V5.2).

Recordings