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Gravis Ultrasound - Hardware Mixing Game List

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Reply 20 of 31, by JayCeeBee64

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I believe these two games also have GUS hardware support:

Creature Shock - has custom GUS patches for music.

oSIHcWp.png

Silverball - uses an earlier version of the Epic Pinball game engine.

@Great Hierophant: You're right, the Pinball Arcade compilation should be added to the list. I have the CD-ROM and it sounds great with the GUS 😀

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 21 of 31, by bristlehog

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JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Creature Shock - has custom GUS patches for music.

But does having custom PAT files automatically mean that the game can do hardware GUS mixing?

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Reply 22 of 31, by JayCeeBee64

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That's why I said "I believe". I'm not sure of that myself (if someone else knows better, then please share your wisdom 😀 ).

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 23 of 31, by bristlehog

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I doubt very much that presence of PAT files indicates hardware mixing support. PAT files are for GUS MIDI engine. For instance, Miles GUS MIDI drivers support PAT loading, but I don't think that Miles GUS PCM drivers support hardware mixing, since Miles has an unified API, and its mixing routines are residing at API level, not at the driver level. However, I am not completely sure, because there are no source code available for Miles GUS drivers, but there's little chance of hardware mixing done by a driver.

This is how it looks in AIL for PCM sound:

Game
|
AIL API <- mixing is here
|
AIL driver (gf1digi.adv)
|
ULTRAMID API
|
GUS

For MIDI music:

Game
|
AIL API
|
AIL driver (gf1midi.adv) <- all messing with PAT files is done here, AIL API even doesn't know of their existence
|
ULTRAMID API
|
GUS

For MSS drivers (ultra.dig, ultra.mdi) it's the same sans ULTRAMID.

I realise that Creature Shock is not based on Miles libraries, but anyway.

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Reply 24 of 31, by 5u3

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^^ Agreed. Considering the limitations (after all, the basic GUS just has 256K RAM), I doubt there is any game with MIDI and hardware mixing for digital sound effects. With tracker music it's a bit easier, you have more control over the card's resources.

Reply 25 of 31, by elianda

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Thats right, however you can simply copy the gus.sdr from pinball fantasies to pinball dreams 2 directory to get the gus option in setsound and of course gus support.

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Reply 26 of 31, by JayCeeBee64

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bristlehog wrote:
I doubt very much that presence of PAT files indicates hardware mixing support. PAT files are for GUS MIDI engine. For instance, […]
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I doubt very much that presence of PAT files indicates hardware mixing support. PAT files are for GUS MIDI engine. For instance, Miles GUS MIDI drivers support PAT loading, but I don't think that Miles GUS PCM drivers support hardware mixing, since Miles has an unified API, and its mixing routines are residing at API level, not at the driver level. However, I am not completely sure, because there are no source code available for Miles GUS drivers, but there's little chance of hardware mixing done by a driver.

This is how it looks in AIL for PCM sound:

Game
|
AIL API <- mixing is here
|
AIL driver (gf1digi.adv)
|
ULTRAMID API
|
GUS

For MIDI music:

Game
|
AIL API
|
AIL driver (gf1midi.adv) <- all messing with PAT files is done here, AIL API even doesn't know of their existence
|
ULTRAMID API
|
GUS

For MSS drivers (ultra.dig, ultra.mdi) it's the same sans ULTRAMID.

I realise that Creature Shock is not based on Miles libraries, but anyway.

5u3 wrote:

^^ Agreed. Considering the limitations (after all, the basic GUS just has 256K RAM), I doubt there is any game with MIDI and hardware mixing for digital sound effects. With tracker music it's a bit easier, you have more control over the card's resources.

Fair enough. I had the idea that the GUS handled MIDI the same way as tracker music, but I can see that's not what really happens. Thank you both for the explanations 😀

So let's scratch Creature Shock off the list. I have a few other candidates that use tracker music, but have to do some more testing before I mention them.

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 27 of 31, by 5u3

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Maybe we should divide the list into tracker and MIDI sections. The difference in sound quality between GUS and software mixing is very noticeable with tracker music, while in MIDI games the GUS is just another synth "flavour", even when the game loads custom patches. In the latter case it's just a matter of personal preference, as in e.g. Roland vs. Yamaha.

Reply 28 of 31, by Scali

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JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Fair enough. I had the idea that the GUS handled MIDI the same way as tracker music, but I can see that's not what really happens.

Erm that IS what happens.
GUS is just a RAM-based wavetable synth. Basically all it can do is hardware mixing, and the PATs are little more than samples with some simple metadata (looping point, envelope etc).
So on a GUS, MIDI is played pretty much the same way as a MOD, XM, S3M or what-have-you.

I think the point here is whether or not sound effects are also mixed by the GUS synthesizer, or if they are pre-mixed on the CPU and just played as a single-channel stream by the GUS synthesizer.
That's impossible to tell from the presence of PAT files.

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Reply 30 of 31, by Gmlb256

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Here are a couple of less known games that supports the hardware mixer feature of the GUS:

Potentially Stargunner too as the setup program when selecting GUS for sound doesn't allow setting the sample rate nor DMA channel.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce2 GTS 32 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 31 of 31, by Gmlb256

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More DOS games that take advantage of the hardware mixer the GUS has:

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce2 GTS 32 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS