🚀 go-pugleaf

  Thanks mainly to Jerry McBride whose comments and experiences helped me to get 
the ESS1868 card working fully with FP26!  I'm not sure how crucial it is to use 
the Version 2.01 of the ES1868DD.SYS driver which he forwarded, but here are my 
findings.
  Well, I did try varying the settings in the CMOS but this made no difference 
that mattered.  When PnP was switched on you could leave the various switches out 
e.g. I/O, IRQ etc.  The problem was that TIMER0.SYS would not load.  Its 
successful loading was crucial for playing MIDI files despite what Erik
Huelsmann said.  Without it the MIDI player just crashes as soon as a MIDI
file is loaded.  The same happens with FP17 unless BASEDEV=TIMER0.SYS
is unremmed.  I tried the HD on another mainboard, also Gigabyte, but a
different model (I use a HD drawer caddy to make swapping HDs easy but on 
this other machine I had to temporarily swap out the ESS1869 card for the 1868 
which is a bit of a pain).  I tried both the versions of TIMER0.SYS that I had.  
The one in the version 1.04 and 2.01 drivers from ESS was dated 27.9.95 and
is 3030 bytes.  The one from a Warp4 box is 3026 bytes dated 9.8.96. 
However, what was important was to overwrite the FP26 versions of
\OS2\BOOT\CLOCK01.SYS and CLOCK02.SYS with the ESS versions (which 
are older and slightly larger files).  When this was done TIMER0.SYS loads! 
and the MIDI player comes to life!
  I agree with Jerry McBride's experience - the 1868 won't work with FP32 
(I haven't bothered with the "non-public" release FPs such as FP31.  There 
you have no hope since the ES1868DD.SYS drivers throws such an exception the 
operating system just stops with a Trap 000D error.
  Well I've advanced from FP17 to FP26 with the ESS1868!  I still think 
it's a great card despite the difficulties because it can take 
concurrent access from Win-OS/2 sessions unlike the Sound Blaster which 
just gives an error message when this happens.

Regards
Victor Bien
VCB Computing(R)
Trying out network distribution to promote OS/2