I believe these two games also have GUS hardware support:

Creature Shock - has custom GUS patches for music.

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 😀

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?

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

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.

^^ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reunion_(video_game)

not sure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_Pinball

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

• Seek and Destroy
• PowBall
• Rollin
• Axia
• Any game using the DSIK (Digital Sound Interface Kit) library such as Flynn Sprint and Terroid.

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

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

• The Horde
• Greedy
• B.A.D (pretty obscure one btw)
• Fit Up
• Boovie (music playback is quite buggy though)