Terratec Maestro 32 96
Lourdes Horace
I've installed a terratec maestro 32/96 isa-based PnP sound card in to my ancient 486 mobo, which is running windows 95. When win95 booted up, it could see this sound card, and I then I pointed win95 in the direction of a subfolder with the driver files in it.
My main question - once I get this thing properly installed, will I be able to select General Midi (@ address 330 for instance) for my DOS music, and hear some funky wavetable music, coming from that dream chip on board this beast?
Solved! There appears to be a fault with the soundcard's capacitors. I think they are called capacitors. They are blue in colour, about 8 of them, and they all look kind of "worn out" looking. I think they need replacing. There's even an article on terratec's website about them -
This problem seems vaguely similar to the problems I was having with the 486 FIC mobo, because those caps looked really bad. I wonder if I could learn a new skill, by attempting to replace these caps? Can caps such as the ones found on this sound card, and also that FIC mobo, be purchased today, or are they banished to the "retro days of yore"? If I can buy them, I would like to learn desoldering and soldering skills, because I don't want to throw away my FIC board, and the "first bad" terratec 32/96 soundcard.
Please note, the link above shows a good photo of the sound card, and the purple ring highlights a cap which has gone really bad. The photo also shows the other dark blue caps dotted about on the sound card.
What a coincidence, I also stumled upon the capicator problem a few weeks ago. But in my opinion you kinda twist the actual cause. The issue the god-send Terratec document points out is not about bad quality of caps, it is about the capacity of 1 specific capacitor. On the Terratec it is C58, normally 3,3uF 16Volt. Terratec advises to replace it with a 1,0uF variant. This card works fine in my systems, so I have no need to replace it.
Leaves me to say; the Terratec Maestro 32/96 seems like a really well made card based on a great chipset. And I really appreciate them uploading this fix.
Have you found the resource settings configuration screen? It writes to an eeprom on the card to remember its settings, and it works well.
BTW, looking at the back of the "bad 32/96" card, there is some strange goo-like substance stuck to it. I don't think this stuff is helping matters. It's dried on solid, so I'll need to soften it with some liquid-based cleaner, but I don't know what to use.
You will need a soldering iron. One with a reasonably fine tip. "Weller" is a well known brand here. Then a small vice or clamp to put the soundcard in.
You need pliers to pull on the capacitor you want to remove. And a proper replacement capacitor.
With one hand you gently melt the soldering joint of the capacitor legs, after which you pull the capacitor a little with the pliers. It might not get far out as the 2nd leg is still soldered too. So you have to do pull that one a bit next. Or try to heat both the joints simultaniously. Or get that copper wire that absorbes the tin and use that first.
Then once the cap. is removed you have to put a new one in. It's somewhat the same procedure. To make it easier you might wanna drill out the two holes with a very small drill, and make sure the capacitor's legs are trimmed a bit before inserting it.
btw...Can anyone recommend a cheap digital camera that can do close-ups reasonably well? I'd like to take a photo of the goo on the reverse side of the terratec maestro 32/96, but my current camera does not do 'macro' at all well.
I bought this card some time ago on ebay in its original package with a sticker on it "now plug and play!" So I wonder if there ever was a non-pnp version of this card (which would require to reserve its recources in the bios).
I changed the BIOS's "plug n play" setting back to "No", and then booted-up the machine with a bootable DOS disk in the floppy drive. When the BIOS performs its POST operations, it displays these 2 lines on the screen:
Once at the DOS prompt, I ran the configuration utility called "terratec.exe", I saw a brief message saying something like !!!FAKE PnP BIOS detected!!! (something like that), and then saw the main terratec configuration screen. I then tried the diagnostics section, and tested the WSS, but this locks up the machine. I tried changing some of the WSS resource values, such as changing IRQ 5 to IRQ 7, and I also tried changing its DMA resource values to 0 and 1, rather than the default 1 and 3, but retesting the WSS still locks up the machine.
When changing those values mentioned above, I was just picking random numbers "out of thin air". I tried running "msd" at the DOS command prompt, but DOS couldn't find this utility. I must find out what resources (IRQs and DMAs) the mobo is using, because picking random numbers for these important IRQ and DMA values is just plain stupid (of me).
Also, when I installed the Maestro software, I installed 2 different versions of the software. One was a single "windows 95" .exe, and the other installation was a 4 part DOS zip package. (All this software was downloaded from terratec's FTP maestro 32/96 folder.)
Edit: I found "msd". I booted up with another HDD with DOS 6.22 on it, and found this utility inside the C:\DOS folder. I couldn't find it earlier, because it might not be included with Windows 95. Incidentally, if DOS has "msd", and Windows 98 has that utility called "system resources" (or whatever it's called), then what does windows 95 have, in order to examine your system's IRQ and DMA resources, etc?
There's something else a bit odd about this "clean installed" win95 installation - I can't reboot or shut down to DOS. If I try to do either of these 2 actions, I get the "It's now safe to turn off your machine" message on the screen. This message also gets displayed if an application attempts to reboot the machine.
Edit: I have removed the maestro card, and now I can successfully reboot the machine, and also restart the machine in MS-DOS mode. This "rebooting problem" may have been caused by the c:\m32\terratec.exe -I DOS initialization routine failing in some way.
I think this maestro card is damaged. The next time I dig out my one and only working maestro card, I'll install its software and get it up and running, then swap it out for this card, just to see if it works OK.
I found a YouTube video comparing a bunch of different sound cards, mostly OPL chips, and he threw in a Terratec Maestro with the Crystal CS4232 chip and it sounds vastly different, but it does sound pretty good in most of the demos. I didn't care for it in Quake. Just curious if anybody has one they use for DOS and how it works in practice. They seem hard to find and pricey. Not sure if it's worth it just based on what I've heard so far.
Is that the Maestro 32/96? If yes, then that's an excellent card. Best one I've ever owned in fact. The MIDI wavetable on it sounds excellent. It's a copy of the SC-55 ROM and sounds very close to a real SC-55.
The drawbacks are that it requires DOS games to support WSS ("Windows Sound System") for 16-bit audio. Its Sound Blaster compatibility is only SB Pro. The OPL clone they use also isn't very good. This is really a MIDI + digital audio card (pretty much what I wanted and it's absolutely great at it,) for OPL music you'd better stick to a Sound Blaster.
Know that the Terratec Maestro 32/96 does not use the CS4232 for OPL/FM. CS4232 does not even have FM circuitry. It uses the 8905 signal generator chip of the Dream wavetable to produce FM music. It is not that the 8905 is inferior to the OPL3, on the contrary, but it is quite different indeed.
So a bunch of very different cards with different chips - where the 32/96 is the odd one out on multiple counts, even if it's the most famous (and yes, I have one and it's very nice too). Which one were you thinking of?
Mestro 16/96 is an amazing card aside from Terratec's ommission of any kind of hardware FM synth on it; I mean, could they not afford to add at least a CS4289 even if not a real OLP3 chip on that? It wasn't a cheap card either.. I love Terratec and their cards but it really gets on my nerves how this card came so close to being the ultimate ISA sound card and missed the mark due to such a basic ommission..
Yeah I was referencing the 32/96 card, my bad. I'm just now breaking the ice with older sound cards so I'm discovering all this for the first time. I first started getting into PCs in 1997 which is when I bought my first, a CTX AMD K6 200MHz system with whatever cheap sound card it had. The first sound card I bought for myself was the original Live! in 1998. I missed the whole DOS era so I'm just now going down the rabbit hole of learning about the older hardware. I've already procured a Sound Blaster 16 CT2940 with the real OPL chip and I'm making a mental list of other cards to be on the lookout for for 486/DOS games. ESS1868F, Opti 82C929, other Sound Blaster models, etc.
c80f0f1006