Gravis Ultrasound Classic -- First Impressions \ VOGONS

Gravis Ultrasound Classic -- First Impressions

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First post, by Maraakate

Posted on 2011-12-10, 07:52

Maraakate Offline

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Finally got a working GUS with 1MB RAM and having it coexist fine with my SB16. After playing many of the iD and Apogee titles that supported it I can for certain say the MIDI is excellent on it. My favourite is to use ProPatches Lite with the TR909 drum sound bank.

However, there are a few things that can be annoying to newcomers. First starters, there is no mixer to adjust the volume. It's all done via the games. The manual even recommends you plug it into powered speakers or headphones with a volume control! I believe because of this it may also cause the clipping I get on ROTT and Duke3D digital sounds for certain sound effects. The sounds will be too loud and it will have digital clipping, and turning the volume down in the game isn't going through a hardware mixer somewhere so the clipping will stay.

To rectify this in those two games, I took the CD in of the GUS and made a cable that has a headphone jack on the other end and plugs into my SB16. This way I can use the SB16 for the digital voices and still keep the MIDI. Best of all I can have both cards coexist and the sound will come out of the GUS.

You have to do this through the CD in though, using the Line in or Mic in will use the internal amplifier and make it sound muffled with way too much bass. To keep the CD just simply plug your CD in to the SB16. You don't even need the drivers for the SB16 to get the CD audio if you do this.

Overall, I'm impressed with the card. But, it's definitely not perfect. If you're not willing to mess around knowing your IRQs, DMAs, and wiring up some way to have both the SB16 and GUS (highly recommended so you have the ability to play all your games) then it's probably best to stick with your SB16.

Reply 1 of 6, by DonutKing

Posted on 2011-12-10, 10:26

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Yep, I run both a sound blaster clone (Yamaha YMF719 with wavetable daughterboard) and a GUS in my 486, stuff that supports the GUS natively gets used with that, but anything thats general MIDI or soundblaster/adlib only goes to the Yamaha.
I ended up just buying a cheap 4 channel stereo mixer and running both cards through that, to a set of powered speakers. Otherwise the GUS would be a lot louder than any other card in my system.

I know what you mean about the volume. There is a mixer utility in the drivers but I never got it to work (seems you have to edit an INI file but even when I did, it had no effect).

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 2 of 6, by Maraakate

Posted on 2011-12-10, 16:32

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That only works on the last revision of the GUS Classic (v3.7 I believe) or later GUS. All the mixer is capable of doing on the original GUS Classic is disabling the line in and mic outputs.

Reply 3 of 6, by Maraakate

Posted on 2011-12-10, 17:01

Maraakate Offline

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Another game that gets funny is Quake. If you haven't loaded another game before playing Quake (i.e. fresh boot) the game will just stutter and do nothing. The easiest way to do this is make a batch file and have it do

"ultramid -Q
ultramid -Q -F"

This will init the GUS. Also, use -sspeed 22050. The game sounds awful in it's default 19khz.

Reply 4 of 6, by Sol_HSA

Posted on 2011-12-12, 09:00

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Ultrasound was one of those cards which fit a time-bound niche; offloading audio processing from the CPU... so yes, it was rather impressive at the time, and then became too limited.

The demoscene in particular embraced the card (hey, no cpu load and rather good sound quality), so much in fact, that even once it was no longer really needed, it still imposed limitations to competitions (real time music must use max 1MB samples etc).

As for the clicks, yes, you've experienced the authentic UltraClicks(tm) ! Congratulations =)

http://iki.fi/sol - my schtuphh

Reply 5 of 6, by Maraakate

Posted on 2011-12-12, 09:12

Maraakate Offline

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The clicks in those two games are rectified by having the SB16 handle the digital sounds. So, thankfully, it wasn't some huge issue I never would have been able to solve.

Reply 6 of 6, by Maraakate

Posted on 2013-03-18, 21:17

Maraakate Offline

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I guess this my later impression of the cards... My biggest issue with them is they appear to be finnicky. Maybe I am unlucky, but I bought a GUS Classic and a MAX in the span of two years that were DOA. The Classic was revived by stealing the GF1 IC from the MAX. But, no matter what jumper settings I used for the MAX (yes, I made sure not to clash with the CD-ROM ADDR) it would never detect the card properly.

I really like the sound out of them, but if they were cheaper on ebay and a little more reliable I'd be keen to recommend then to more people wanting some vintage systems. Maybe they are commanding $50+ because people are having the same issues I have been having with cards going bad with no real reason that I can see.

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