How to get my EWS64 XXL working in Windows XP?

[Bartnl]

Hi,

Nice work of the Terratec home page to refer to this forum on "how to install the EWS64 XXL under Windows XP" and no solution can be found here. (how customer friendly!)

Can anyone tell me how to install my EWS64 XXL under windows XP?

Thanks in an a million!

Bart

[Luigi]

Take a look at this link: http://www.htwm.de/ukindler

[GD]

Hello everyone!

I finnaly got the EWS's codec to function properly under Windows XP, by following the instructions found here: EWS Installation under Windows. The page is in german and thus I used systran translation from systran.otenet.gr) to get an english version. I do not know if Babelfish would produce better results (i think they use systran too), but here's what I was able to find out... I just hope this was not posted previously and that I am not burdening you with things that have already been said...

Now, note that from what I was able to understand, the above site is the most complete source for the installation of the EWS so please if anyone could spare some of his/her free time to serve the EWS community, it would be of great usefulness to provide an english version of the following site: http://www.studio4all.de/htmlg/welcomeewst.html, especially the EWS64 Installation and EEPROM programming part...

It seems that in order to install the EWS under win 2000/XP properly, you have to disable ACPI in your computer BIOS, and set the ACPI aware OS entry to "NO".

Then an ACPI disabled version of Windows 2000/XP must be installed... In Windows 2000 this can be done by changing that setting in the power management tool in the control panel. However under XP (this applies to win2k as well) this can only be done during a clean install: When you install Windows from a cd or from the 4 boot disquettes you can create using a utility found in the cd (if your bios does not support boot from cd), the first thing windows setup does is to check for any SCSI and/or RAID controllers installed and load the appropriate drivers. For some seconds before this process starts, in the lower part of the screen (the status bar, that is) you will see a message "Press F6 now if you want to manually provide a driver for your SCSI controller" or something like that. PRESS F5 INSTEAD. Acconding to that page (I have yet to test it myself) this will enable you to disable ACPI functions under WinXP. The downside to this is that if your SCSI/RAID controller is not natively supported by windows, you won't be able to install windows on a drive connected to that very controller...

Now here are my personal experiences: Before installing Windows XP, I was using Windows 2000. I have to say that win2k have proved to be the most trouble-less microsoft OS i have seen to date. Of course it is heavier than XP but once configured, everything works flawlessly. Of course with the EWS this comes at a price, since not all features of the synthesizer can be explored but anyway... I managed to install the EWS64 properly with everything functional (both the codec and the synth) without disabling ACPI and setting PnP aware OS to "no" in the BIOS (I think). What I did in order to get it to work though, was to run ews64cfg and set everything to PnP... Some sound skipping when having usb serial emulation activity was corrected by lowering the usb latency. This setup worked perfectly until I upgraded by mobo's BIOS. Then I could not get the synth to work. I did nothing to correct the problem at the time, since I was about to install winxp before the end of the week anyway. This ended up with my finding out that neither the codec, nor the synthesizer would work under winXP!

I accessed every source I could find, only to come up with the information that the EWS would not function under winXP, until a came accross the reffered page during a google search. I disabled ACPI, set PnP aware OS to "no", re installed every EWS device and voila! The codec and synth still have an exclamation mark in device manager, but surprisingly the Codec now can produce sound which made me very happy! Anyway not that I did not follow the instractions on the page very strictly since that required a clean installation of the OS which I was not prepared to do at the time, so I still have hope that the synth might work as well...

Another problem that remains to be solved is that I cannot program the EWS's EEPROM. I created a pure DOS startup disk from the format command of winxp, copied ews64cfg to it, but whenever I try to execute the .exe the system hangs completely, after the EEPROM setup interface is presented on screen! I tried different configs (ACPI disabled/enabled etc) but the result is always the same... Moreover before this problem arose (before i installed winxp, that is. Of course this cannot be attributed to winxp since the config utility is run under DOS), I could not find "PnP" entries in the settings drop-down list... I wonder if this is because I downloaded the utility from terratec's site. Maybe the CD version is different. When I said above that to get the EWS64 to work I set everything to PnP, that was with the CD version of EWS's config utility...

Luigi: Are there WinXP installation instructions in that page? It seems a great resource too, but I could not find any WinXP installation info...

I hope this helps a bit! Please experiment with your setups to get this thing working again!

Here's my config for reference reasons:

300Watt Power supply
440-GX based board with AMI BIOS (AMI MegaRUM II, and yes this is the mobo's model)
PII 450MHz CPU
Terratec EWS64XL version 1.2
Matrox G400 MAX GFX card
on board SCSI by lsi-logic (symbios 896-based U2W dual channel controller)

Here's some system info: (virtual IRQs **** ... Can you understand what IRQs are available out of this mess?)

IRQ 0 System timer OK
IRQ 1 PC/AT Enhanced PS/2 Keyboard (101/102-Key) OK
IRQ 6 Standard floppy disk controller OK
IRQ 7 EWS64 Codec Driver OK
IRQ 8 System CMOS/real time clock OK
IRQ 12 Microsoft PS/2 Mouse OK
IRQ 13 Numeric data processor OK
IRQ 14 Primary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 15 Secondary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 31 Intel(r) 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller OK
IRQ 48 LSI Logic 53C896 Device OK
IRQ 49 LSI Logic 53C896 Device OK
IRQ 64 Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet NIC OK
IRQ 128 Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - English OK

And here's a conflict info report:

I/O Port 0x00000072-0x0000007F PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000072-0x0000007F Motherboard resources

Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources
Memory Address 0x0001-0x0000 Motherboard resources

I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF Intel 82443GX Pentium(r) II Xeon(tm) Processor to AGP Controller
I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - English

I/O Port 0x00000100-0x00000CF7 PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000100-0x00000CF7 EWS64 XL Synthesizer

I/O Port 0x000000A2-0x000000BF PCI bus
I/O Port 0x000000A2-0x000000BF Motherboard resources

Memory Address 0xCC000-0xDFFFF PCI bus
Memory Address 0xCC000-0xDFFFF Motherboard resources

I/O Port 0x00000010-0x0000001F PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000010-0x0000001F Motherboard resources

Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF Intel 82443GX Pentium(r) II Xeon(tm) Processor to AGP Controller
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - English

I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB Intel 82443GX Pentium(r) II Xeon(tm) Processor to AGP Controller
I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - English

I/O Port 0x00000022-0x0000003F PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000022-0x0000003F Motherboard resources

Now that might be a problem but I have not time to work these conficts out. Any suggestions? Do you think they might interfere with the EWS? Anyway does bus mastering only apply for PCI devices?

Thanks in advance for your feedback everyone!

[Werner_O]

Hello GD

1. I am the author of the german homepage http://www.studio4all.de with hints to the setup and configuration of the EWS64 under Windows 9x/2k/XP and Cubase Rel. 5.
Remark:
At this homepage you can find 33 very powerfull Cubase 5 mixermaps for the EWS64 too.
These mixermaps you can download directly from http://www.studio4all.de/downloads/mixermaps_ews64.zip
Note: These mixermaps are written in english notation (not in german). Only the included helpfiles are written in german.

2. Thank you, that you've mentioned my homepage at this place!
Until now my homepage is only available in german language , but an english version is in preparation.
I've already found three people, who help me to translate my homepage to an additional available english version of my homepage.
Unfortunatly this job is really very time consuming:
I need additional help!
Anybody, who wants to help me, can contact me at [email protected]

With kind regards
Werner

[Werner_O]

Good news for EWS64-user:

Since a few minutes an early beta-release of the english pages of my homepage studio4all is available :-)
Goto: http://www.studio4all.de/start.hmtl

At this page you will find a lot of hints to the EWS64:
Windows 9x Setup
Windows 2000/XP Setup
Cubase Setup
EEPROM Setup
and more...

I hope that you can benefit from at least some of all these hints.

Unfortunately not all of the contents of my german homepage are available until now, because this is an very early beta-release.
The 'Project Micro-PC for the EWS64', all my mixermap-pages and the link-page are still missing.

Further the text hasn't been corrected by native english people (Sorry for any mistakes!) and a lot of screenshots from english Windows-versions are still missing too (I cannot do them myself!).

Please feel free to help me!!!
I really need your help, it's too much for me alone...

Does anybody wants to help me?

With kind regards
Werner