Reply 20 of 30, by Nicht Sehr Gut
- Rank
- l33t
jez, I'm struggling with my response here. My mind is filled with sarcastic replies. I'll try to keep them in control.
Originally posted by jez Gravis Ultrasound? Hahahahah.
An excellent card that I loved. Only went to a SoundBlaster Live when I was forced to (had a couple of applications that required some DirectX support that the GUS didn't have). Imagine my surprise when I found all my MIDI files now sounded terrible. I managed to improve it using some of the various soundfonts out there, but I was never really satisfied with the results.
Put simply, the Ultrasound easily thrashed the SoundBlaster, which at the time only supported 1 or 2 simultaneous digital sounds, whereas the GUS handled 32 and had 16-bit stereo well before the SoundBlasters. In general, SB cards for me, have the been the epitome of bland averageness.
Just so you know, My AWE32 (in the 486-66) likes to pick it's IRQ, DMA, and address at random after every reboot. The settings it chooses are always useless and requires that I change them manually every time. I have yet to find a fix for this.
Maybe you should have done some research before buying a PC.
*cough*
*cough**cough*
*cough**cough**cough*
I DID.
Too many consomers expect stuff to 'just work', ya know.
*stares*
Do you have any idea how arrogant that statement sounds?
Let's see, Video card says it has 3D hardware acceleration and will support Microsoft's upcoming DirectX standard.
The video card company then resists releasing drivers that have proper DirectX support claiming that it was very difficult to implement and not conducive to the design of the card.
Perhaps you can explain how my requesting proper support was unreasonable?
Very rarely did I have a problem getting a game to work. Maybe that was because we had *very standard hardware*.
Same standard story. Same condescending tone. If you really know the PC's history, then you know that after IBM actually started selling licenses to make "clones", you know "the standards" were decided by little more than mob rule. You know about the artificial 640K barrier, the fight between EMS and XMS memory formats, EISA, IBM's PS2, OS2, etc...
The logic that I should sit back and wait for everyone else to make up their minds on what they want and copy them...just for a machine to work...is nonsense.
Your rarity of having trouble, consider yourself lucky. I was still living in a dorm at the time of my entry into PC world and found that it was filled with guys who all had their share of troubles...and yes, they got what was considered "the standard" hardware. The only difference was that we each had different problems with different programs.
The "standard"GUS wasn't SoundBlaster-compatible, and so inevitably had problems.
Well this is a shock as I was emulating SoundBlasters from the word go (actually, it wasn't until I started trying out DOS titles that didn't have GUS support). Basic SB in DOS, SP Pro when run in a Windows command prompt.
Glad I didn't have one.
Glad I did.