Mau1wurf1977 wrote:@ 5u3 Apart from Second Reality, can you recommend any Demos that make a GUS with AMD Interwave chip really stand out?
AFAIK Second Reality only uses eight channels, so the classic GUS and the GUS PnP should sound identical. When playing the demo on both cards, the classic GUS has a lot of bass in the technoish sections of the soundtrack, but sounds rather "muddy" overall, whereas the GUS PnP is brighter and more detailed in the atmospheric/movie-like sections.
As for other demos, I will try to compile a selection and post it later.
Mau1wurf1977 wrote:
Also I was under the impression that the GUS was able to load instruments "on the fly".
E.g. the GUS Classic only has 256KB memory, however the patches in the ULTRASND\MIDI folder are much larger. The total folder is ~ 5 MB.
Yes, this is done by the GUS MIDI drivers. Demoscene stuff doesn't care about these and accesses the GUS RAM directly.
The best program to explore the capabilities of GUS(PnP), AWE and probably even EWS cards is the Open Cubic Player. Get this installed and configured (check out the documentation!), visit The MOD Archive for some modules and have fun!
@rg100: Recommended ISA cards: ET4000, Cirrus Logic, WD Paradise.
It is possible to use the Sound Blaster IDE port for harddisks, but you can't boot from it and it doesn't work in plain DOS. About 1997 I had an old 486 with a harddisk running off the SB IDE port. It worked under Win95 (wobbly) and Debian (with the help of some kernel parameters), but it was terribly slow.