Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000
Encyclopedia
Ensoniq
Ensoniq Corp. was an American electronics manufacturer, best known throughout the mid 1980s and 1990s for its musical instruments, principally samplers and synthesizers.- Company history :...
's first direct foray into the PC sound card
Sound card
A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...
market. The card arrived on the market in 1994. It is a full-length ISA
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture is a computer bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers introduced with the IBM Personal Computer to support its Intel 8088 microprocessor's 8-bit external data bus and extended to 16 bits for the IBM Personal Computer/AT's Intel 80286 processor...
digital audio and wavetable synthesis
Wavetable synthesis
Wavetable synthesis is used in certain digital music synthesizers to implement a restricted form of real-time additive synthesis. The technique was first developed by Wolfgang Palm of PPG in the late 1970s and published in 1979, and has since been used as the primary synthesis method in...
device, equipped with a 2 MiB
MIB
MIB may refer to any of several concepts:* Master of International Business, a postgraduate business degree* Melayu Islam Beraja, the adopted national philosophy of Brunei* Motion induced blindness, a visual illusion in peripheral vision...
Ensoniq-built ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
-based patch set. The card's analog audio quality is superior to many cards of the time.
Hardware overview
Ensoniq ES-5506 OTTO
The Ensoniq ES-5506 "OTTO" was a 32 voice wavetable oscillator chip used in implementations of wavetable synthesizers. Musical instruments and PC sound cards were the most popular applications....
' synthesizer chip with a companion 'Sequoia' chip for MIDI duties, along with a Motorola 68EC000 8 MHz controller (low-cost variant of 68000
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...
) and a small amount of RAM. Note that although it has RAM, the card does not support uploading of sound samples for the synthesizer. With a coprocessor
Coprocessor
A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, or encryption. By offloading processor-intensive tasks from the main processor,...
on the sound card, host CPU overhead is tangibly reduced. This was a marketed feature of the card, in fact, and was mentioned on the box and in advertisements. Digital audio conversion to analog output was handled by an Analog Devices
Analog Devices
Analog Devices, Inc. , known as ADI, is an American multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion and signal conditioning technology, headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts...
codec
Codec
A codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream or signal. The word codec is a portmanteau of "compressor-decompressor" or, more commonly, "coder-decoder"...
. Soundscape S-2000's MIDI synthesizer lacks an effects processor, meaning digital effects, such as reverb
Reverberation
Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound is removed. A reverberation, or reverb, is created when a sound is produced in an enclosed space causing a large number of echoes to build up and then slowly decay as the sound is absorbed by the walls and air...
and chorus
Chorus effect
In music, a chorus effect occurs when individual sounds with roughly the same timbre and nearly the same pitch converge and are perceived as one...
, are not supported. Without these effects, the sound samples were often described as "dry". The quality of the samples themselves still earned the card good reviews, however.
The card carries a variety of CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
interfaces. Support for so many interfaces was necessary because, at this point in time, proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
interfaces were the only connectivity for CD-ROM drives. The adoption of the ATAPI standard, along with the Serial ATA
Serial ATA
Serial ATA is a computer bus interface for connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives...
standard of today, has removed this burden of compatibility.
Innovatively, and a direct result of the chipset originating in their synthesized instruments, the sound card has its own operating system which is uploaded to the board on system boot through a call to the card's 'SSINIT.EXE' initialization program. There are no large TSR
Terminate and Stay Resident
Terminate and Stay Resident is a computer system call in DOS computer operating systems that returns control to the system as if the program has quit, but keeps the program in memory...
programs to run for software support, as were used and caused compatibility issues on other popular sound cards, such as Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32
Sound Blaster AWE32
Sound Blaster AWE32 is an ISA sound card from Creative Technology. It is an expansion board for PCs. The Sound Blaster AWE32, introduced in March 1994, was a near full-length ISA sound card, measuring 14 inches in length, due to the number of features included.-MIDI capability:The Sound Blaster...
. The Soundscape also has a hardware MPU-401 implementation. This, combined with the lack of TSRs, allows enhanced compatibility especially with DOS protected mode
Protected mode
In computing, protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, is an operational mode of x86-compatible central processing units...
games, where some cards such as the Creative AWE series could not function without native support. TSRs also consumed a significant amount of vital conventional memory
Conventional memory
In DOS memory management, conventional memory, also called base memory, is the first 640 kilobytes of the memory on IBM PC or compatible systems. It is the read-write memory usable by the operating system and application programs...
in MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
which can create memory configuration challenges if a DOS program needs most of the free.
Soundscape S-2000 has several descendants, including the SoundscapeDB
Ensoniq SoundscapeDB
The SoundscapeDB is an Ensoniq-designed and produced MIDI daughtercard designed to interface with the "Waveblaster" header available on many older sound cards. It was released in 1994....
, Soundscape Elite
Ensoniq Soundscape Elite
The Soundscape ELITE was Ensoniq's high-end ISA PC sound card offering. It offers the highest MIDI quality of any PC sound card Ensoniq produced. The board is an evolution of the company's previous Soundscape S-2000. The Soundscape ELITE was launched in March 1995....
, Soundscape OPUS
Ensoniq Soundscape OPUS
The Ensoniq Soundscape OPUS is a Gateway 2000 OEM sound card, and possibly was used by other OEMs, but was never sold to Ensoniq's customers directly. It was a Soundscape-like board, using the Ensoniq "OPUS" multimedia sound chip that only was used on these OEM boards...
, Soundscape VIVO90, and AudioPCI
Ensoniq AudioPCI
The Ensoniq AudioPCI is a PCI-based sound card released in 1997. It was Ensoniq's last sound card product before they were acquired by Creative Technology. The card represented a shift in Ensoniq's market positioning...
. The original Soundscape S-2000 was replaced by Soundscape II, a board based on the ELITE but without the daughtercard (it was an upgrade option).
Compatibility
The digital sound section of the card is compatible with a wide array of hardware, and has its own high-quality native Soundscape mode. Of critical importance at the time was support of the Creative Labs Sound BlasterSound Blaster
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
, a card that was the ubiquitous sound standard of the day. Soundscape can emulate the Sound Blaster 2.0, an 8-bit monaural
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
device with FM synthesis capability. While digital audio effect emulation is quite good, the FM synthesis emulation leaves much to be desired. Emulating FM synthesis through software was too demanding for system CPUs at the time (typically an 80486
Intel 80486
The Intel 80486 microprocessor was a higher performance follow up on the Intel 80386. Introduced in 1989, it was the first tightly pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to use more than a million transistors, due to a large on-chip cache and an integrated floating point unit...
), and so Ensoniq mapped FM synthesis to the card's General MIDI
General MIDI
General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
support, meaning that the FM music did not sound correct because it was composed with FM synthesis in mind, not real instruments. This could be especially poor if the game was an older title that used FM synthesis for sound effects.
The reasoning behind using emulation
Emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
instead of real hardware was cost and demand. At the time Soundscape arrived, the General MIDI option was available in almost every game and was substantially superior to FM synthesis. FM synthesis hardware support for games at the time required an additional chip, the Yamaha OPL-2
Yamaha YM3812
The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 is a sound chip created by Yamaha Corporation in 1985 and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.It is backwards compatible with the OPL aka YM3526, to which it is very similar – in fact, it only adds 3 new...
or OPL-3
Yamaha YMF262
The Yamaha YMF262, also known as the OPL3 , is an FM synthesis sound chip. It is an improved version of the Yamaha YM3812 , adding the following features:*twice as many channels...
. PC gamers at this point would also often have two sound cards anyway, having upgraded to wavetable audio from their Sound Blaster-supporting audio card. The Soundscape's Sound Blaster emulation could be toggled on or off, and so in the case with dual cards, one would choose General MIDI to run on the Soundscape, while choosing the other sound card for Sound Blaster support. So the need for real OPL-3 hardware was not typically very great. However, it was very important for mind share
Mind share
Mind share, or the development of consumer awareness or popularity, is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion. When people think of examples of a product type or category, they usually think of a limited number of brand names. For example, a prospective buyer of a college education...
amongst consumers, and was critical for OEM system sellers because adding a separate card would add cost to the system.
Software support
If software natively supports Soundscape, and many mid/late '90s programs do, the card provides 16-bit stereo digital audio sampled at up to 48 kHz, along with the excellent General MIDIGeneral MIDI
General MIDI or GM is a standardized specification for music synthesizers that respond to MIDI messages. GM was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee and first published in 1991...
support. Ensoniq released drivers for many operating systems, including; IBM OS/2
OS/2
OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...
, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1x
Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during March 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0...
, Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, and Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
. Ensoniq later released Microsoft DirectSound
DirectSound
DirectSound is a software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system. DirectSound provides a low-latency interface to the sound card driver and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams....
-supporting drivers as well. In these operating systems, programs accessed the sound card through its driver, instead of directly, allowing full hardware support without the need for the software developer to support the card directly.
External links
- Case, Loyd. "In Search Of The Ultimate... Sound Card". Computer Gaming World Dec. 1994: p.138-148.
- Ensoniq Corp. Soundscape S-2000 Manual, Ensoniq, 1994.
- Ensoniq Corp. Web Site by Ensoniq Corp., Multimedia Division Product Information and Support Pages, 1998, retrieved December 25, 2005
- Ensoniq FAQ by Ensoniq Corp., Multimedia Division Product Information and Support Pages, 1997, retrieved December 27, 2005
- Weksler, Mike & McGee, Joe. "CGW Sound Card Survey". Computer Gaming World Oct. 1993: 76-84.