I think Doom and Duke3d support GUS natively and no Ultramid functionality is required to be loaded. A game that requires Ultramid for GUS is e.g. Tyrian. In case of problems I would even recommend to unload megaem and/or ultramid if you run a game that supports the GUS natively.

I can not say much about the iwsbos emulation as I mostly have some Soundblaster compatible card in the same system and basically never used it.
I load MegaEM for two purposes:
General Midi emulation through the GUS at 330h and Ultramid functionality for games that require this. For an EMM386 configuration less conventional memory is needed compared to loading Ultramid.exe. The general midi emulation is for games that do not know GUS at all and can not be patched to do so. A nice thing is that the emulation works on top of existing hardware. So if you have a DB-50XG on 330h and configured your game to GM playback from 330h then you can load Megaem and the game will play from GUS, unload and the game plays from DB-50XG. Megaem just displays some warning that another hardware is already using 330h, which is of course correct but it puts the emulation layer just in front of it rerouting to GUS.
If you have a DB50XG already, then the general GM emulation on the GUS is probably rarely required.

Ultramid.exe is then for Himem configurations and games that require it.

This is all the same software configuration as for the GUS classic. The only difference with the Interwave based cards is, that Megaem defaults to the ROM soundfont.

If I would do some bogus ranking:
-native Interwave support
-native GUS support
-Ultramid through Ultramid.exe or Megaem with custom instrument patch loading
-Ultramid through Ultramid.exe or Megaem with default instrument patch loading
-General Midi through Megaem emulation
-nothing of the above

There is no Soundblaster in a GUS.
obligatory car comparison: No one uses an airplane to drive on roads.

By default I use DOS without EMM386. And when you run MegaEM without EMM386; it advises one to run IWSBOS instead. After reading the GUS Wikipedia article, I understand IWSBOS does SB+FM emulation. No midi goodness there, as you already knew... I will just remove the SBOS related files.
Will try to get the Tyrian Jukebox going with UltraMid then.

Hi

Neither MEGAEM and IWSBOS are for me but with regard to GENERAL MIDI
then I am pretty certain neither need to be run on the EC251 to play back
the on-board 1 MB sample ROM. The midi port just needs to be enabled.
This is how I remember using the card at least. I would have had an SB16
alongside it back then before getting an AWE64 sometime in late '97 and
definitely remember selecting 0x0330 Midi and SB16 digital sound in Duke
3D.

I could try now I suppose if but it also needs an IRQ so I won't 😀

Bye-bye

Are you sure?
I have only a GUS PnP Pro here and can't speak in detail how the EC251 behaves. But native General Midi through 0x330 would render the GM emulation through Megaem useless. I doubt a company puts effort in developing some redundant feature.

Hi

The EC251 doesn't ship with MEGAEM, that's a Gravis only feature.

It does come with IWSBOS though and this actually appears to be
required, however, I don't know how and whether I can make it
work.

I will look at this later.

Bye-Bye 😀

EDIT: UPDATE

So my memory isn't 100% accurate but you can use the midi ROM
in DOS without himem or emm386, however, it does load IWSBSDRV into
memory.

1st, enable the MPU using IWAVECFG if disabled, then set Mpu401Emulation=on
in iw.ini and run iwsbos.bat after booting into DOS. At this point you can
choose port 330 for the midi device in DUKE 3D.

bye

As I wrote I didn't used SBOS much, so it can as well be that IWSBOS is also able to emulate an MPU401. For Duke3D the native GUS support uses the GUS classic *.pat files. (Result depends on which pats you use. There are for example the well known ProPats)

Hi

Ultimately this isn't a good card for games as it doesn't
have enough memory and the on-board ROM isn't the
best since the reference design chose the cheapest
option.

The Programmer's guide has this to say about the ROM:

In conclusion, the card is what it is and unlike a lot of
the junk I have this card actually exists inside a junk
computer. Most cards I have are in a cardboard box
never to be heard again, so at least it has something
going for it, and for me, that's playing back demo tunes.

Take care, bye!

I tried today to cope with my two AMD-based sound cards, namely STB SoundRage 32 and ExpertColor MED3201. However, I've not been able to squeeze anything out of them. Neither HMI SOS setup nor Miles Sound System see these cards (albeit both these libraries have Interwave support for both PCM sound and MIDI music).

I've got no experience with any AMD Interwave based cards. Do I need to install some DOS drivers to go on? I've seen some drivers earlier in this topic, however, they are all for different versions of Windows, while I have pure DOS only.

I checked my setup and noticed that running the initializer is required for games to utilize the card.
Things are still like I left them in the beginning of this year, when I spend a few days configuring and testing the card.
Attached a few files that should help you to setup the DOS drivers in a similar fashion. It is a total of 17MB on my system. In my autoexec.bat there is the line "DOSAPP\GUS\GUS.BAT init". GUS.BAT is in the attachment.

Thank you.

I have already found MED3201's DOS and Windows 3.1 drivers (uploaded them to Vogonsdrivers for next generations). It turned out that I have Windows 3.1 on my PC, just forgot of it's existence.

So far the results are such: drivers are installed, IWINIT initializes the card, but there is nothing in DOS, everything including Interwave's native utilities says that 'the card is not initialized'. In Windows 3.1, there is PCM sound, but attempts to play MIDI files end with 'there's no MIDI device'.

Moreover, after some time passed, IWINIT works no more, it just hangs the system, albeit I'm sure I didn't change anything about it.

Here's how ExpertColor MED3201 DOS setup looks:

looking at this picture: http://geryon.ru/expertcolor_med3201.jpg ; I don't see any room to add RAM to this particular card.
My PCA761AW was also kinda useless, until I flashed it to identify itself as a normal GUS PnP, and added 512kB RAM.

Is the STB SoundRage 32 working better?

Certainly there should be people on this forum more knowledgable about troubleshooting GUS cards then me...

Yes, the only way to add RAM to MED3201 is by hardware modding.

Yet my intention is not to use these cards as GUS, but to test Miles Sound System and HMI Sound Operating System Interwave options in games.

I didn't try Soundrage yet: couldn't find DOS drivers.

What I thought to be Soundrage 32 is seemingly Soundrage 32 Pro (also known as Compaq Ultrasound 32 Pro). Soundrage 32 doesn't have any RAM slot, while Soundrage 32 Pro has one and thus supports up to 4 Mb of RAM.

STB Soundrage 32:

STB Soundrage 32 Pro (Compaq Ultrasound 32 Pro):

It has Compaq part number on its flipside.

I have found drivers for both cards and uploaded them to Vogonsdrivers. Will try more running the cards.

Well, in short, I got the STB card working under Windows 98SE using Compaq drivers. But that driver pack doesn't have any means to emulate GF1 card, no patches, no nothing. How do I do it?

Please can you reupload picture of the EC251 card?

Pretty sure this is that picture:

Thnaks gerwin!
Is is same picture ec251interwaveaudiocard.jpg which was posted by sklawz in first post?

I am like 99% sure it is a copy of the one originally posted by sklawz. (But in my soundcard pictures archive the filenames have been changed since, as to auto-sort alphabetically)

bristlehog wrote:

I have found drivers for both cards and uploaded them to Vogonsdrivers. Will try more running the cards.

I was unable to find the drivers on Vogonsdrivers and did google search. Vogonsdrivers showed up with a direct link to the file for the STB Soundrage 32 Pro
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=739

A search for the non-pro is not bringing up any results.
Is it this one?
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=740