Amigaz wrote:

hmm..how big is the SETRAM.EXE in your SETUP dir on your GUS PnP cd?

SETRAM.EXE - file found on CD in the SETUP folder = 5,295 KB application file (as reported by my windows XP box), 16/11/1995 is the date stamp.

Please note: this was a boxed revision 1 board. I've got a feeling I might have an early CD "pressing", with potentially an inferior patch files set on it?

Mine is 5329kb reported by Winblows Vista

Been playing with a GUS PNP lately. I used downloaded drivers as I have no CD.

The GUS PnP doesn't really work in Win98 - the various drivers and applications do not install properly. Reverting to Win95, it goes fine.

In Win95 you get an icon in the control panel that enables you to load different patch sets. You will need ram big enough or they don't load of course.

The 4mb sets are for Windows. In dos you get the gf1 patch sets, so it should sound the same as a non-pnp gus in dos games. I understood that some dos games contained there own gus sounds, in which case i suppose you can't change the sounds of these.

Patch sets need to be set up in the iw.ini file I think. You need to set up a path or filename.

The 4mb sets are hard to find as there was a copyright issue - most gus-related sites do not have them. You get a pair of files, gsfull4m.fff and gsfull4m.dat. The dat file is 4mb in size. It took me a few hours to track them down, and it seems I didn't save the link. Duh!

Interesting comments re: your GUS PnP. 😀 There's something I don't understand about how the PnP card works. Say you are testing the Pro version, which has half a meg of RAM on board. Then you add some more RAM using the SIMM sockets. In theory, you could end up with 8.5 meg of RAM.

But what happens if you want to use a 1 meg patch set, for your old DOS games? How does the PnP Pro cope with that? Does it use the onboard RAM and also a bit of the SIMM RAM to load up the 1 meg patch files? (I thought the SIMM RAM could not be used for DOS games?)

Perhaps you can only use the Pro version for DOS games, and also, you can only have half a meg patch file set for DOS games. 😕

retro games 100 wrote:

But what happens if you want to use a 1 meg patch set, for your old DOS games? How does the PnP Pro cope with that? Does it use the onboard RAM and also a bit of the SIMM RAM to load up the 1 meg patch files? (I thought the SIMM RAM could not be used for DOS games?)
Perhaps you can only use the Pro version for DOS games, and also, you can only have half a meg patch file set for DOS games. 😕

No, the GUS PnP uses whatever RAM is installed, regardless if you load the classic GUS compatibility patch set or a different one.

The reason why you can't use the bigger GUS PnP/Interwave patch sets with old games is because they are stored in a different format, which has to be supported by the sound routine of the game. So if you load a GUS PnP patch set and try an old "classic GUS only" game, you'll get weird sounds instead of music.

The 512k onboard RAM of the GUS PnP Pro version looks like a rather useless gimmick nowadays, but it wasn't back in the days when SIMMs were still expensive parts.

Well, I know that the Mega-Em utility states it's supposed to combine its own functions with that of IWSBOS/SBOS/MAXSBOS with the Ultramid utility, but it causes games to crash when selecting Gravis for music and then for sound effects.

The only option I know of is to get the ultramid driver, pop it into wherever you installed the dos drivers, then pop ultramid.ini into where the GUS patches are for now.

If someone can figure out how to get mega-em's ultramid functionality to work without crashing the system, I'd be very thankful.