Hardware Overview
The card uses an 'OTTO' synthesizer chip with a companion 'Sequoia' chip for MIDI duties, along with a Motorola 68EC000 8 MHz controller (low-cost variant of 68000) 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 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 codec. Soundscape S-2000's MIDI synthesizer lacks an effects processor, meaning digital effects, such as reverb and chorus, 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 interfaces. Support for so many interfaces was necessary because, at this point in time, proprietary interfaces were the only connectivity for CD-ROM drives. The adoption of the ATAPI standard, along with the Serial ATA 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 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. The Soundscape also has a hardware MPU-401 implementation. This, combined with the lack of TSRs, allows enhanced compatibility especially with DOS protected mode 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 in MS-DOS which can create memory configuration challenges if a DOS program needs most of the free.
Soundscape S-2000 has several descendants, including the SoundscapeDB, Soundscape Elite, Soundscape OPUS, Soundscape VIVO90, and AudioPCI. 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).
Read more about this topic: Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000
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