UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver 

Dang, this looks incredibly useful. Thanks for highlighting it, gonna have to try it out!

Please add it to your starter pack. This is amazing!!

Not to mention the developer himself is incredibely friendly and quick with rolling out patched versions - when I had a problem with my Aztec PnP card, JazeFox quickly identified the issue and sent me a fixed version the very same day, that not only supported my card, but also correctly set up the card's IDE header, so I could use a CD-ROM drive in my 486 as well! Two thumbs up for that!

One driver to rule them all.

This is the kind of video that make this channel shine! It could've easily become a friday video by adding the content I missed here: background info about how it works and more overall background story. Yes, people can find all that out themselves, but that applies to any information available on the internet. Regarding the UNISOUND tool itself: another really great creation out of the community, kudos to the author! Reminds me of Linux with this one "driver" fitting many devices comfort. I''ll try to find out via Vogons if it's also open source. Greets!

Sound card stuff is one of the main things that prevent me from taking part in the hobby more than I do. It can get so fiddly. This is an awesome project. I'm going to have to give it a try.

This was great, i have an average of 100 isa sound cards

The perfect sound cards to listen to Phil's Computer Lab with!

Getting sound cards to work in DOS is the second hardest thing to master behind memory management. This will be a useful tool for many.

I'm so happy about this unisound initializer software. I have a P2 driving a pci 3D Banshee and a sound blaster 16 isa PNP with a Roland sound canvas and I could never get the CT2950 to output via the midi port for the sound canvas to work. I always had to drive a 2nd CMI sound card for the this part. I tried OEM and 3rd party drivers all failed but after watching this video and launching the unisound initializer 5 min later the creative sb16 pnp is now working 100% through the midi port and I have even taken out the 2nd sound card. Thank you for this video and to the creators of the unsound software.

This tools is amazing, worked with 5 out of 6 of my ISA sound cards (all of them using very different chips and brands). The only one that was not able to setup was a rare AZT2316A/CS4248-KL

As a big bonus, this can help getting PNP cards to work, in non-PNP PC's. Currently I use an ESS ES1688F without issues in my 286. It's been impossible to get any PNP cards to initialize, with their original drivers. Sadly my IBM 5160 (8088) have a blown capacitor, but if it gets back to life, I intend to try it out on it as well. Cards such as ESS, often just use the extra ISA 16 bit part for the CDROM controller, if there's one

This is going to be a lifesaver for all my stupid Opti cards that never want to work.

It worked well with my recently acquired Philips PCA750AF, which uses an YMF719E-S chip.

This is awesome. I would love to see more things like this developed for DOS and win9x. Stuff like this, FTP clients/servers, and whatnot make operating these machines in modern times so much easier.

The HP card is so funky with that wedge design, I expected a rarer manufacturer for that!

so much win in this video. i feel like this a breakthrough for something that has been needed for quite a while now.

Great! I'll try this on my Toshiba Satellite 4000CDT with OPL3-SA3 and ALS0120 soundcard!

I miss the old MS DOS. You can edit the autoexec.bat and set the resources manually. I used to have the Adlib sound card, a Pro Audio Spectrum clone and later a Gravis Ultra Sound card that has wavetable for real samples of instruments. Now days everything is emulated or a wave file. It's amazing how technology changed over the decades. thanks

Great idea with implementing this to the boot disk, makes dos users life easier😁 Love this idea of one driver/initialiser to rule them all👍🏻

Perfect i was looking for a Soundcard for my Gateway 450 P3 system and then this popped up ''nice ''

This is a wonderful piece of software. I like particularly how it also handles the GUS PnP, and the EMU8K init for AWE cards.

Amazing! If only we could have something similar for the pile of PCI sound cards I have lying around.

Thank you for your work as always Phil. I will have to test this with the AWE32 CT3980. Might make this version even more valuable.

What a great tool. I have a SB16, and yeah, getting it configured and working properly on a Win98 machine in DOS was a giant PITA. Wish I had this when I was setting it. Should help out big time in the future though.

Thank you! This seems incredibly helpful for folks who have over a dozen isa cards sitting in the box like me.

Weird how some Award BIOS will show the PnP card list/init output on the initial POST screen and others don't. The example shown in the video clearly configured something, but only showed the results on the hardware overview screen right before starting the OS. Technically Unisound shouldn't be needed if a PnP BIOS properly did it job, but some clearly don't. Its a real lifesaver on pre-PnP machines though.

the one thing that holds me back from starting my dos pc was the sound card "driver" for my Ensoniq SoundScape... now this is what i'm looking for! Thanks!

I can test this with the pile of ISA PnP sound cards that I never found DOS drivers for.

Excellent idea, Dos sound especially ISA PnP based cards was always a dark art. This should save a lot of pain.

Hands down, best channel on retro pc parts and for retro pc community! Thank you Phil! I'm always eager to learn something new :) !

Thank you for the great tool, I was already crazy with the GUS sound card taking a lot of memory.

Unbelievable that the UNISOUND driver works with the most sound cards out there. Maybe that the AC97 and HD Audio cards will be support in the future?

Awesome idea! Thank you both! I'm thinking now in putting 2 ISA+1PCI sound cards (OPL3, SB16, EAX) in my Pentium II 233 rig P.S. PCI will be a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or a Maxi sound Fortissimo with Yamaha chip

Great work. Reviving sound cards which would otherwise be trashed.

Looks interesting Phil ill have to try it out, I have so many sound cards also just Picked up a Gravis Ultrasound this week too💖💖💖

Thanks Phil, I read about this for the first time on your facebook, I was expecting more info about it, the truth is that it is possibly the solution to all my sound problems in ms dos. Next weekend I will try it and I will tell you. Unfortunately at the time of Ms Dos and Windows 95 I was a user but I did not configure or build pcs, I was very young. I was around 10 years old when I got my first 486dx4, so configuring a sound card in ms dos was not something I did at the time, although today I work in tier 1 and 2 technical support, I did not have That experience, but it is never too late to learn good old stuff

i love the es186x and ymf71x opl-SAx pnp isa sound cards! :D

No more dodgy websites! thank you Phil! You are awesome!

Awesome! Exactly what we need. Hope he include mixer settings as well but anyway, great project 👍

Thanks WOW this even works with vmware workstation if you setup the sound card as sound blaster 16

An AOpen AX6BC mainboard? That's pretty darn cool. I still have mine running with a Pentium II 400MHz and in use for reading/writing floppy disks, ZIP disks and QIC/Travan tapes. Marvellous bit of kit.

This is the most exciting news for ISA sound cards! I have a box of sound cards sitting around that I am going to be able to use now. Thank you for the video.

This is marvelous. I have a lot of ISA sound cards of various kinds. At some point I'm going to test all those and give some feedback to the developers of this tool. I love stuff like this!

Amazing video, thank you. Now I will be able to complete my Atari PC4 restoration with sound card! ;-)

As always nice video ! I'll try that out on various platforms : let's say from Socket 7 to... hm Socket A with VIA KT133/KT133A that has 1 ISA slot :) really cool to see projects like that from the community

5:30 Waaa, I owned that cart in 1999. Remembering that on windows XP the drivers gave its an incredible increment of volume sound.

Nice! I managed to pick up an AWE64 Gold for a good price off eBay a while back and never got around to testing it, so this should make it much easier!

This is brilliant! Booting into dos from windows 98 was always a case of... fingers crossed... please please let this be the driver that works with this sound card. Definitely include this in the dos starter pack!

fantastic, just orderd a Soundblaster 16 CT2910 , for my Pentium II 400mhz / 3dfx voodoo 3 - 3000, never been good with DOS, so hoping this will help, BIG Thanks.

That would be great if you added this sound initializer to you MSDOS packages

Woo thanks! All the cards I never could have back in the 386 days. Not 100% sure but I think my first card was integrated on my 233mmx All my gaming back then was via pc speaker blips. Incidentally windows 3.2 (no typo) supported some sounds via the pc speaker

Thanks Phil for another good video. Another option to use in the future with a retro build. Unfortunately all of that has been put on hold now. Take care. PS: At times I thought you dropped a few jokes in there but will not comment cuz not sure. LOL!

Wow, I'm impressed. Finally, no more hunting for the right settings for some ancient or obscure Sound Blaster (I have a whole boxful of the durn things). Thanks Phil, great info. And someone down below reminded me... what about DOS networking?

Great video Phil, thanks again. I don't have an Isa sound card, but when I get one I will test the driver for sure.

Thanks for the video Phil. I will test this out this weekend.

Imagine this tool 30 yrs ago!

I just got an AZT2320 to work on Win 3.1 using Unisound on my 486, I just had to install Soundblaster Pro from the Windows Sound pack. Just had to add Unisound to autoexec.bat first

I have Win10 x64 I tryed to install an old sound card and I gave up went to the computor shop near my house and paid $ 7.00 for a usb sound card it installed in 15 sec and it works great

Great!! Looks very useful. Thank you for sharing this with us.

G'day Phil, Wow! Phil, this looks really cool, My oldest OS is XP but for others with older OS this will be Awesome, as I am on a Disability Pension & can't afford to Patreon the channels I love, so I let the Ads play before & after the video, today the first Ad before your video is just shy of 35min + a 4min Mous Ad 😲😲😲😲😲 so more than 4x the length of your video in ads, Good work RU-vid

That’s really, really cool.

Very Cool. Can`t wait to try this out. Thanks Phil and Thanks JazeFox

It looks like this driver supports most cards that have Sound Blaster compatibility on-board. A lot of sound cards defaulted to emulating a Sound Blaster Pro when the PC wasn't running Windows; it became a de facto standard pretty much until Windows XP finally killed DOS mode. My personal recommendation when building a DOS gaming PC (Other than not doing it, because DOSBox is just sooo much easier.) is to go with a pre-PnP Sound Blaster 16. Everything's set with jumpers, and no drivers or TSRs are needed at all.

I've been watching the development on vogons.org. Haven't actually tried it out yet but feedback is very positive so far.

I would like to see you review Avance Logic ALS100 and other ALS cards. I see them often overlooked, but I've had good experiences with mine. Don't know about the other ALS sound cards, though...

wow cool, i probably have like 10 different cards here ill try it out

So I have probably sold most of those sound cards new back in the day. Now you have to remember most of it was www. Anyway the best ones would use the official sound blaster software. Also I normally wouldn't even install the dos drivers. Set blaster command was great. When windows 3.1 rolled around. I would install the floppy disks and have to go fix the set blaster command. The best thing is finding out a list of what was what. So on a sb16 card I think depending on the model would take a Panasonic 2x drive. Thus, you would order in a big box of oem sound blaster and Panasonic cd-rom drives. Plug them right in without a problem. This all went away with ide. But if you notice the Mozart card sorting the oak chipset with 4 connectors. It would take the non ide bus and if you the correct version the IDE bus. Sony, Panasonic, IDE and I'm not sure what the last one was for. Great card for machine with a i/o card with 1 ide port. Once they moved the stuff onto the Motherboard. Once again it ended the interfaces.

PHIL have you done a video on memory managers? I used to swear by QEMM and the Manifest memory utility that came with it. It gave EXCELLENT memory and load order tweaking tips as well as over the top lower memory recovery. The manual has over 115 pages in it. I don't use it anymore but it was the king of the hill once upon a time and would make a fun video.

I have the azaudio aztpnp initializer too, which I can share. The Packard Smell I have contains a modem/sound card with an azaudio chip and it had the hard drive intact when I found it.

All those EISA cards. Brings back memories. I do wonder if Linux still has drivers for all those cards.

Worked with Awe64 value DOS 7.1

Outstanding, bloody outstanding!! My box of sound cards finally has some use! Your doing the lords work Phil.

Cool I have a box of random cards bought on Ebay, testing the video cards were easy. Will have a go testing utility its a bonus it works with multiple cards. :)

Very cool. If this could help me get some XP era onboard sound cards working in DOS, that would be the ultimate win.

Thanks for doing this video and raising awareness of this utility, which is absolutely indispensable for making use of the numerous no-name ISA sound cards floating around, and a natural inclusion to your "all-in-one" operating system image for dos based gaming systems (www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-starter-pack.html). This is every bit as useful as the CuteMouse driver or the SoftMPU utility and should be in every retro hardware enthusiast's toolkit.

Brilliant, thanks for the head's up, Phil!

Thanks for this information! I will definitely try it out!!

Finally something that might actually work with my add310680 ad chips card. :P

For some reason I always connected triangular ISA boards with low-quality.

I'd like to know if MediaVision ever released the ProZonic ISA soundcard? It was supposed to be an "everything" soundcard with support for Soundblaster (8 and 16 bit), Pro Audio Spectrum, AdLib (dunno if just standard or gold), and IIRC even Covox and ??? I remember seeing advertisements for the card but then there was the financial problems, new ownership, denials from the new company about ever making a card called the Jazz 16 (and other products from the previous MediaVision), followed by going out of business for good.

Very interesting. I'm going to try this on my Dell laptop just on the off chance it'll support the onboard sound in DOS. I will of course let you know.

It may make sense to add the SB 16 / AWE 32 non-PnP range as well. These cards only have the port set (e.g 220h), the rest can be set up by software. Contact me for details, I just updated that piece of code of mine to also handle autoexec.bat BLASTER values.

Probably off your topic but any chance you would do a vid on off platforms such as not Microsoft or Apple McIntosh & your reviews & maybe a bit of how to .. Thanks for doing what you do.!!! 🙏🏻😔🙏🏻

I wish this would work with laptops with integrated sound. I have a stubborn Compaq that claims to have DOS/SB emulation but it's extremely picky. Maybe I'll give it a go anyways.

Thumbs up for Phil and Jazefox! Too bad that all my sound cards were by Creative Labs (SB Pro 2, AWE32, AudioPCI, Live! Platinum) with drivers still readily available on original installation disks and for download. ^_^;

Jeez I hate it when you make DOS gaming videos, it always makes me want a DOS machine, but as I already have a SKT 478 Win XP, a SKT 775 Win 7, a X79 based Xeon machine (10 cores 20 threads for £70, just wow), along with an i7 2600k machine and my modern i9 9900k machine, all of them apart from the last 2 are your fault, lol, I just don't think I have the space for a DOS machine, but I want one, lol.

thank for that Phil that is great

Looking forward to trying this out with my Soundblaster 2.5. No, this is not a typo. :P

Cool!

I'm a bit surprised you have an ALS120 sound card, can you do a review on it? Back in '96 my first PC was installed with ALS100 sound card, not sure of the difference, I do remember it worked pretty well, both in DOS and Windows 95.

learning more stuff ty :)

Would be nice if something like this existed for PCI cards as well, and then there is the idea of a Intel HDA universal dos driver. One can dream.

I think you just made most of your ISA sound card setup videos obsolete. I know PCI sound cards are not supported but I'd try a PCI card with a SB Link, if I had one. This is really cool utility and it will make multi ISA soundcard setups a breeze. Unfourtunately, I had to more around a lot of stuff to work from home so my retro PC is not available.

Had ALS120 bought it for my first PC (486DX2-66) Not perfect, had problems at some configs at some OS's but in DOS worked fine.

Very usefull video. Thanks :-)

It's unfortunate the only way to get it is via a Mega link on one forum. Something like this should really be on GitHub.

Back in the days its was called; Plug & Pray or Pluck and Pay.....

It's kinda like Azalia/HDA...except it's for DOS!

back in the day you could still grab the als120 driver from realtek after avance logic was taken over but now even that is gone, its a shame.