Mediavision Jazz PCMCIA Sound Card and Windows 95 [6/4/97]

Of course i don’t have anything to do with Mediavision. Mail me any comments, suggestions, corrections etc, thanks. Forgive my bad english.

You can find this file at my current Web page : http://www.pacher/net

Contents

1. What is the Mediavision PCMCIA Sound Card
2. How to make it work under Windows 95
   1. With Windows 95 Card & Socket Services
   2. With old Card & Socket Services, or without any
   3. As a PCMCIA joystick card

1 What is the Mediavision PCMCIA Sound Card

This is a 16-bit sound card, OPL-3 music compatible based on the Mediavision Jazz 16 chipset. It’s a PCMCIA card with a dongle with audio line-in, headphones, microphone, volume control, midi/joystick port. It has drivers with or without socket services.

The PCMCIA sound card can work well under Windows 95 with adlib music or joystick but it crashes fairly often on digital sound. And Mediavision doesn’t supply any Windows 95 drivers for this card (official policy is that it doesn’t work).

2 How to make it work under Windows 95

2.1 With Windows 95 Card & Socket Services

Well, it’s a big hack just now, hopefully in time i will be able to determine exactely what is necessary.

First copy all the Mediavision files from a windows 3.11 installation of the Mediavision PCMCIA Sound Card. Obviously you need at least all the files which are in the oemsetup.inf. You need all the medvsn stuff already installed on your computer under Windows 3.11.

Second put them in a directory with the oemsetup.inf file, which is also available at my Web site.

Third, add to your Windows 95 config.sys, the emm386.exe line with X=D800-D8FF ie exclude needed when the Mediavision Sound Card is used without card & sockets services.

Fourth, boot Windows 95, go to Configuration Panel and choose add sound hardware, Have disk, and point to the location of the oemsetup.inf file. Then add all the stuff needed.

Now the card will hopefully work, but only if each time before you insert it under Windows 95, you do an execute setsound.com. There might be a problem if you set some startup sound files as it will play and fail before you can execute setsound.com from windows 95.

2.2 With old Card & Socket Services, or without any

I haven’t tried it, but all the preceding stuff should work ok, you’ll need to put your PCMCIA card before starting Windows 95 though (or run setsound.com as above).

Please email me all your experiences about it becoz as you can see, this stuff is still very experimental. Note that i haven’t been able to make the Midi Interface work, because you can’t select it with the new Windows 95 Midi Mapper.

2.3 As a PCMCIA Joystick card

Well, I just bought a subnotebook (Digital Hinote Ultra) with integrated sound. To use the joystick function under Windows 95 just install the Mediavision stuff for dos only, add X=D800-D8FF to your EMM386.EXE line and then and /F to the setsound.cfg in the Mediavision directory (you might have to change the IRQ too) so that the adlib music of the card doesn’t clash with the integrated sound of the laptop.

Then just execute setsound.com after you insert the card to enable the joystick (it works very well) and add the default Windows 95 joystick driver to the Windows 95 control panel. Of course the integrated sound of my subnotebook means that it will difficult for me to do any further work on making the sound card work under Windows 95.