Ensoniq Soundscape VIVO90
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The VIVO90 was an ISA bus sound card produced by Ensoniq starting in 1996.
VIVO90 was Ensoniq's generational step forward from the Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000 and Soundscape Elite boards. It was first produced in 1996. VIVO90 has similar specifications relative to the older boards, but was built to cost less to manufacture. The length of the board is significantly less, made possible by using greater integration in the components. The VIVO90 has a lower quality MIDI patch set ROM. Instead of the 2 MiB ROM that the Soundscape and Soundscape ELITE were equipped with, the VIVO90 uses a 1 MiB set similar to the SoundscapeDB and OPUS-based Soundscape.
To reduce costs and design complexity, the Motorola 68EC000 CPU and Ensoniq Sequoia chip combination were replaced with a 1-chip solution, labeled Ensoniq Mark5. Due to the missing Motorola 68EC000 CPU, the card loses hardware support for the MPU-401 standard. This necessitated Ensoniq's first TSR program to support DOS audio. The Soundscape cards had only needed a simple initialization program to set the card up for the operating system it was being used with, a program that did not stay in memory after it was finished. With the TSR came the unfortunate requirement to have MS-DOS's EMM386.EXE memory manager loaded. Forcing the use of the EMM386 program caused problems with programs that were incompatible with the expanded memory emulator. However, for programs without issues, the VIVO's TSR offered compatibility with all of the standards supported by the older Soundscape cards, including Adlib and Sound Blaster Pro. FM synthesis was again software emulated, resulting in a less-than-perfect realization of this type of sound if chosen in a program. The VIVO90 also fully supported "Soundscape" modes within games, offering both General MIDI support and 48 kHz 16-bit audio.
The card uses an Analog Devices codec for digital sound effects and final output mixing duties.
The VIVO90 was very popular with the PC OEMs, like the OPUS board. It was often found in PCs from Gateway 2000, among others.
[edit] Specifications
- ENSONIQ 1 MiB (compressed) Waveform ROM
- Award Winning ENSONIQ OTTO 32, 32-bit wavetable DSP synthesizer
- 16-bit record/playback at up to 48 kHz (mono/stereo), 16-bit A/D D/A codec
- Lowest Noise: S/N 90 db (audio through) typical, Frequency response: 20Hz - 22kHz
- 128 General MIDI wavetable instruments, 61 drum programs, 128 MT-32 instruments
- Full Duplex Operation (simultaneous Record/Playback)
- Supported Industry Standards: AdLib, Sound Blaster Pro (2.0), General MIDI, Windows Sound System, MT-32, FM (software emulation), MPC 1,2,3, DirectX
- 100% Tested to professional standards. Functional and AC parametric (THD, Signal-to-noise ratio, etc.) testing. Audio Precision test system.
- External Connectors: Microphone/Line input (mono/stereo)(dynamic, electret), CD/Aux input (stereo), Audio output (line level + headphones), Joystick/MIDI interface
- DMA & IRQ's Plug and Play or Software Configured
[edit] References
- 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
| Ensoniq audio cards |
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Soundscape S-2000 | SoundscapeDB | Soundscape Elite | Soundscape OPUS | Soundscape VIVO90 | AudioPCI |
