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Gravis UltraSound installation

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First post, by AustinRover

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I have a Gravis UltraSound (Rev 2.4 ISA non plug & play version). This works fine in my old 486 system but I wanted to install it in a newer retro PC I have which has an AMD Duron 950MHz CPU and a VIA chipset motherboard.

However in that PC I was unable to get it working properly. The diagnostics find the card and can read it at address 240. It confirms the 1Mb of memory that's on-board, but when you do "Check SBOS Mode" it says "Multiple SBOS IRQ's generated" (yes, including the erroneous apostrophe).

"Check DMA channel" says "Busy (read)".
"Check UltraSound IRQ" says "Ultra IRQ Timeout".
"Check SB/MIDI IRQ" says "SB/Midi IRQ Timeout".

Does anyone know why it doesn't work?

I think it's because the PC is short of IRQs and resources. IRQ 11 is already shared by 2 USB controllers, the ACPI controller and the LAN card. Maybe this PC just has too much resource clutter...??

Reply 1 of 5, by 5u3

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Do you just want the card to act as a GUS, or use the Soundblaster emulation (SBOS) as well?
Without SB emulation, you'll get away with one I/O Address, IRQ and DMA each: Just set both IRQs and DMAs to the same value and ignore the complaints of the setup program.
A simple choice for the IRQ is 7, it's usually assigned to the printer port, but can peacefully coexist with a GUS.

Reply 2 of 5, by megatron-uk

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I've found the GUS (a Max, in my case) tricky to get running in more modern systems (P3 and upwards). I'm fairly sure it's to do with ACPI, auto IRQ assignment and all the other niceties that, in general, made things easier. However, the GUS is fairly picky - with the current board I'm using (a MB800H industrial P4 board) I've turned virtually every on-board device (serial, parallel, sound, secondary IDE channel, onboard network) off, and set the PCI/IRQ options to legacy wherever possible in the BIOS.

It seems that it depends on what order the BIOS initialises the remaining devices that affects whether my SB16 and GUS ISA cards work or not. Try turning off as much onboard stuff as possible - that will certainly help in freeing up IRQ lines.

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https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 4 of 5, by Menkau_ra

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Try format c:.
Turn off all unnesessary devices in your BIOS like COM ports, Parallel port, IRQ for USB; PnP OS should be NO.
After that install MS-DOS.
Install GUS. If you have a SB already don't use SBOS.
And only after that install Windows.
In this case Windows will use only resources that were left and will not touch IRQs from GUS.

Teppic, I think some motherboards have a shared PCI-ISA slot. It says in a manual. Only one slot (or ISA or PCI) could be used in such case. Asus P2B is one of them. But I can be wrong.

Reply 5 of 5, by AustinRover

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Thanks for the info everyone. It looks like to get it working on this PC I'd have to disable a lot of stuff to free up some resources. I also have a TV card in that PC, so even if I disabled stuff like USB it still might not work.

I have decided to sell the UltraSound as I'm just not using the 486 enough any more and need to clear some space. I've listed it on eBay if anyone's interested:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=150556381612

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