leecher1337 / es1969

ESS ES1969 x64 driver for Windows, sourcecode reconstruction and driver

About

For unknown reason, there are no 64bit drivers available for the old ESS PCI Soundcards like the ES1969 (Solo1), ES1946, Allegro PCI etc. Therefore they don't work on newer Windows versions like Windows 10 x64 (at least not in native ESFM mode). However these cards feature a native MIDI Synthesizer called ESFM that some people may want to use. This project is an attempted reconstruction of the ES1969.SYS soundcard driver shipped with 32bit Windows Versions, source code should be a pretty accurate reconstruction of the original sourcecode including naming schemes.

Additionally, this project also provides a generic 64bit Gameport driver for the MPU-401 port, in case some people are missing it, as Windows since XP doesn't support it officially anymore and I didn't find a 64bit gameport driver.

Installing

Preparation

Download the appropriate ES1969 driver package for your machine from the "Releases". Optionally, you can also download the gameport-driver, if you want to try and need it, but it's not required.

The driver is self-signed, as I don't have a driver signature certificate which has insane requirements (register as a company, pay yearly fees for the certificate, let Microsoft sign the driver, ...), therefore until someone offers to sign the driver you unfortunately only can run the driver in test mode:

Open up command prompt as administrator and run the following command:

bcdedit /set testsigning on

If you get the "The value is protected by Secure Boot policy" error, you need to disable Secure Boot in BIOS before running the command. Alternatively refer to this guide on how to enable test signing using the boot menu.

Next, install the certificate shipped with the driver as trusted root certificate by running the script install_cert.cmd as administrator in the distribution directory. If it doesn't work, double click the es1969.cer file and import it by adding it to the store of "Trusted publishers".

Then reboot to enable test mode in order to be able to install unsigned drivers.

Installation

Just install the driver like any usual driver. Go to "Device manager" and search your audio device (which has an exclamation mark, as driver cannot be found), double click and "Update driver...". Then tell the wizard to locate the driver on your computer.

Then browse to the directory where you put the es1969 drivers and hit Next. ES 1969 driver should be found and installed.

If you need the gameport, be aware that I was unable to test it, as for me it ended up in a resource conflict error, possibly because I have an onboard soundcard too which doesn't let me use the MPU-401 Port, as it is occupying the same IO-port range, but I cannot disable it (BIOS locks up my machine when disabling onboard sound, seems to be a bug), so it's just a guess about the reason. Use the Issue tracker if you really need the Gameport for some reason.

You find a device like i.e. "Game port for Thrustmaster ACM" in Device manager under "Audio, Video and Gamecontroller". Double click it and Update driver. As before, tell the wizard to locate the driver on your computer. On next dialog, do not browse to the gameport driver path, but choose "Select from a list" on your computer. The go to "Have disk.." and locate the directory of the downloaded gameport driver and then select it from the list. This way, it will overwrite the default driver that disables gameport.

Configuration

The driver should work out of the box. However, there is an important enhancement to the original driver by including the ability to load different MIDI patch sets. The rest of the parameters are the same as with the original ESS driver (no idea if anyone ever documented them, but usually you don't want to change them).

Setting different Midi Patches

There were 2 different Sets of MIDI-Patches, one in the NT4 driver and the default one in the Win 9x/ME/Win 2k+ driver. The default patchset of the appropriate driver has been linked into the drivers. With this driver however, you can change the patch set via a registry key. The patch sets can be obtained from ESSplaymid repository.

To use a patchset other than the linked-in patchset (i.e. the NT4 patchset), first locate the registry key containing the driver settings. This is by opening the device properties in the device manager and reading the property "Driver key", which gives you the correct path in the registry under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class.

For example, my settings are located under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e96c-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0002

Create a new reigstry key named Patches with type REG_SZ there which points to the soundbank to use. Ensure that you use a NT-Path, otherwise it won't work. If you are using a standard DOS-Path, say, C:\Temp\bnk_NT4.bin, then you have to prepend \??\ in front of the filename, so the filename to use would be \??\C:\Temp\bnk_NT4.bin.

Don't forget to disable and re-eanble audio driver in device manager to apply the settings (or simply reboot).

Playing MIDI files

When playing .mid files i.e. with Windows Media Player, Widnows uses the Windwos built-in Microsoft GS Wavetable Synthesizer and outputs it to the sound card as wave-sound, thus, not using the card's own Synthesizer. Therefore you need a dedicated MIDI player, like for instance TMIDI: (Tom's MIDI Player). On "MIDI out", select the ESS ESFM Synthesizer and it will play via the ESS native Synthesizer using this driver.

Compiling

The repository contains 2 driver sources. One for Windows NT4, one for Windows 2000 and above (WDM).

The NT4 driver

The NT4 driver consists of a usermode part (AUDDRIVE.DLL) and a kernel mode part (AUDDRIVE.SYS). The kernel mode part does the communication with the audio card whereas the usermode part just does i.e. the handling for the WINMM Multimedia System (i.e. MIDI handling) or displaying the configuration dialog for the card's parameters (IRQ/DMA).

Currently, only the AUDDRIVE.DLL usermode part has been reconstructed, the kernel mode driver could be reconstructed, but I don't see any need for it, its mainly useful for reference purposes.

In order to compile the NT4 driver, copy the directory structure under src\NT4\mmedia to the src\mmedia path of the NT4DDK. Then open NT4 build shell and:

1. Issue build in NT4DDK\src\mmedia\drvlib directory to compile the prereq. library
2. Issue build in NT4DDK\src\mmedia\es1969\synthlib
3. Issue build in NT4DDK\src\mmedia\es1969\dll

As a result, you will have a AUDDRIVE.DLL i.e. in NT4DDK\lib\I386\free (or whatever build type you choose).

The Windows 2000 (and above) WDM driver

This is the driver you most probably want to use. It is based on the WDM and therefore is compatible with Windows 2000 and above.

You can build it with Windows 2000/XP DDK by just entering the win2k directory and issueing build there, but it won't generate the .inf file and it won't sign the driver file which is recommended since Windows XP and required since Windows Vista. It just contains a generated .inf file for x64 builds (as there is a x86 driver by the publisher anyway, so you won't need this driver on x86).

Therefore it may be more convenient to compile it with Visual Studio 2019. For this, open the es1969.sln file in the win2k/vs2019 forder with Visual Studio 2019 and compile your preferred version. If you have the ability to properly sign a device driver, I would be delighted if you can do so and provide a signed driver to me for easier redistribution.

Documentation

ESS Solo-1 chip documentation

ESFM documentation

ESSPlayMid native ASM reference implementation

Mirror of ESS drivers from the manufacturer

List of ESS soundcards

Driver is based on SB16 NTDDK driver sample and may contain some leftovers from it.

Tested configurations

Currently the driver has been tested on Windows 10 x64, but it should work on any Windows version that supports the WDM driver model (if in doubt, recompile it for target platform). The driver has been tested with the ESS 1969 (Solo-1) soundcard.

Bug reports

Please use the project's Issue tracker.

Author

All hard reverse-engineering and programming work for the win2k driver has been done by leecher1337 ([email protected]). Project homepage is https://github.com/leecher1337/es1969

Special thanks to pachuco for ASM-port as Native ESFM that helped debugging issues with the reconstructed driver by allowing to switch between ASM "reference" implementation and reconstructed C code in usermode.

es1969's Issues

BSOD in Win7 x64

Sorry to bother but I already bought the card but unable to use it. I wish I knew earlier that there is no official x64 driver. Here's the dump file.
121923-24882-01.dmp

Still trying to build the driver myself but the learning curve is quite steep.

Tuning inaccuracy

Noticed you used these FNUM values, presumably copied from the original driver:

es1969/src/nt4/mmedia/es1969/synthlib/NATV.C

Lines 78 to 82 in dc95b62

	SHORT fnum[12] = {
	514, 544, 577, 611, /* G , G#, A , A# */
	647, 686, 727, 770, /* B , C , C#, D */
	816, 864, 916, 970 /* D#, E , F, F# */
	};

I believe those were calculated with fs=50000 (instead of 49716), so the pitch is about 10 cents off. Not immediately noticeable, but might become an issue if someone uses this for music production and expects it to be in tune with other sounds.

The following numbers will be more accurate:

517, 547, 580, 615,
651, 690, 731, 774,
820, 869, 921, 975

On the other hand, this could clash with any fixed-pitch voices in the existing patch banks, so changing it might not improve the general use case. But maybe that's only percussion. You decide :)

Please support some GM2 sysex messages.

I know the original driver doesn t do it. But would it be possible to implement some things like chorus, vibrato rate or reverb type or channel s master volume (maybe filter resonance isn t possible in theory).

Building for 32 bit win2k/xp

This is compilable for 32 bit win2k/xp, yes?
Might be interesting to try in place of original.

Move midi implementation to user mode

Midi implementation in win2k kernel mode + user-provided file is a rather dangerous combination.

Mostly because the midi implementation doesn't sanitize the bank format. At least, I've gotten the NT4 extracted implementation to crash program with garbage data(reading bank out of a naked malloc, lol).

Adition to suggestion, user mode component should send FM writes one buffer at a time(flushing) to reduce context switches.

Of course, as a bonus, this lets the user diddle with the implementation.