Siemens Scenic Mobile 710 (ESS ES1878 & ES690F) General Midi Wavetable

Hello friends, this video is about a unusual soundcard: It is the ESS ES1878 which is the low power mobile version of the ES1868f, and in this case it is located in this beautiful Siemens-Nixdof Scenic Mobile 710 laptop from 1997. This was the time when you pay several thousand EUR for such a unit, and that&why it was designed for business usage - heavy weight well build quality and outstanding performance for its time. The Scenic Mobile 710 came in an unsual, eyecatching wedge-shaped design. It provides line in and line out as well as a gameport, and Siemens also did implement the ES690 GM-compatible wavetable! I&never seen a laptop with build in hardware wavetable so far, so this was a big surprise to me. The heart of the unit is a Pentium 166mhz cpu. The HDD is located in the middle, and in rhe left and right there are two expansion bays you can individually exchange based on your needs: CD-Rom, Floppy, Battery or power supply ( you can easily prepare the external power supply for internal usage and put it in the left bay) The ES1878/ES690 is connected through the ISA bus. It does not need any drivers, even the wavetable is working out of plain DOS through MPU401 on Port 330. As its speciality is the wavetable here, I present it playing two tracks (Descent 2 Intro theme and Level 31 music from Doom II (Wolfenstein 3D level) to give you an impression of its capabilities. Cheers, Ernie PC-SOUND-LEGACY