Retro Review: Terratec Promedia Base 1 - Part 2
18th June 2024
In Part 1 we explored the physical aspects of the Terratec Promedia SoundSystem Base 1, a late ISA sound card from 1997. Here's the card again:
Terratec Promedia SoundSystem Base 1
Bought in April 2024 for £14.35
In this Part 2, I will install the included drivers for both DOS and Windows. Drivers available for the Base 1 include DOS (version 5.0 or higher), Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, and OS/2 Warp 4.
DOS Driver Installation
The card comes with a CD-ROM containing all the drivers, manuals in various languages and other software. The DOS installation is kicked off by running INSTALL. It's very clunky for 1997 but is functional:
The various choices for each configuration item are listed in the table below:
| Configuration | Choices Available |
|---|---|
| WSS Base Address | 500h, 510h, 520h, 530h, 540h, 550h, 560h |
| Playback DMA Channel | 0, 1, 3 |
| Capture DMA Channel | |
| Codec IRQ | 5, 7, 9, 10, 11 |
| Sound Blaster Base Address | 220h, 240h, 260h, 280h, 2A0h |
| MPU-401 Base Address | Disabled, 300h, 320h, 330h, 332h, 334h, 336h |
| MPU-401 IRQ | Disabled, 5, 7, 9 |
| Ad Lib Base Address | 388h |
| Game Port Base Address | 201h |
| L3 | Disabled, 168h/IRQ 10/DMA 4, 1E8h/IRQ 11, DMA 4, 170h/IRQ 15/DMA 4 |
| L4 | Disabled, 36Eh/IRQ 0/DMA 4, 3EFh/IRQ 0/DMA 4, 376h/IRQ 0/DMA 4 |
| Super Logical Device | Disabled, Super |
When you select '0' to complete the installation, it copies the files and updates both CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT if you chose to do so:
By default, the installation directory is C:\ADISOUND. You don't get much with the DOS installation - just a driver that initialises the card and the mixer.
The changes made to CONFIG.SYS are the addition of this single line. This just initialises the card and doesn't stay in memory. In AUTOEXEC.BAT these two lines are added:
which runs the mixer, pulling in the values as stored in the MIXER.CFG file in the ADISOUND directory. There is also a separate INIT.INI file which is only used by Windows.
When you restart your machine, you will see something like this:
The Mixer
The DOS installation provides two mixers - one with a pretty terrible Windows-esque interface and another that's very much traditional DOS:
As always, my testing of this card has unused inputs muted (volume reduced to 0) to minimise background noise.
In Part 3, I'll record the output of the Terratec Base 1 in a number of games, both via Speaker Out and Line Out, and then compare this with other cards I've done the same testing on.