Just gotta say, the MIDI emulation of the Gravis Ultrasound in DOSBox is extremely cool! I dug up my old set of GUS v4.11 floppies and installed the software without a hitch. Note that I've never really owned a GUS, and the floppies I have are copies; dont' even know where I got them from originally.
Anyhow, the PLAYMIDI utility works great... quite interesting to hear how the old GUS sounded 😀
BTW, what got me piddling around with this is simply that I had been experimenting with the GUS MIDI support of various DOS games (I had previously installed just the GUS patches in my DOSBox games directory)... tried DOOM/Duke3D/Hexen and it worked great 😀 I then spent the next hour and a half locating those old GUS floppies 🤣!
PLAYMIDI is the only utility that works for me... I tried with Doom and Doom II and music didn't work 🙁
IIRC, in the afore-mentioned games, I may have had to set the digital sound device to Sound Blaster, and then the music device to GUS. Going from memory here, I seem to recall problems when both the digital and music devices were set to GUS at the same time.
use General MIDI as it has way better quality than GUS
Heh, for all of my DOSBox gaming I use my SBLive (along with the large soundfont that I just mentioned here a few days ago). Nevertheless, it's nice to reminisce about the old GUS 😀 Not to mention, <IMHO> the GUS emulation of DOSBox sounds *considerably* better than what most folks have for a GM device... the lowly Micro$oft GS Wavetable SW Synth.
Varka wrote:
Use Timidity with GUS patches. EVERYTHING (that supports General Midi) has GUS support then!
Although I've never owned a GUS, I've installed (and heard) quite a few of them for my customers back in the day. Timidity always sounded sort of "dry" to me compared to an actual GUS (as well as compared to DOSBox's GUS emulation)... I dunno, simply MHO 😀
@All,
Heh, was just playing around with the "jukebox" feature of "Tyrian" (in the game's setup program)... I used to use it as a DOS screensaver back in the day, sounded quite nice coming out of my WaveBlaster (1) at the time 😀 Quite interesting to hear how the Tyrian tunes sounded with a GUS.
FYI, in case ya'll didn't know, you can strip out *ONLY* just the jukebox portion of the Tyrian Jukebox with the following files:
...that's all that you actually need to run just the jukebox 😀 After initially running "SETUP.EXE" to configure the sound and MIDI devices, you can select "Jukebox" from the setup menu to play around with it. Alternatively (at a later time, after you have initially configured the sound and music devices), you can invoke the jukebox directly by typing "SETUP.EXE JUKEBOX" (minus the quotes).
Oh, almost forgot... for GUS support you'll also need to load the GUS's "ULTRAMID.EXE" MIDI driver before configuring the jukebox (or actually running it).
BTW, yf you didn't know of them already, here are the various Tyrian jukebox keyboard controls:
1Esc/Q - Exit 2P - Pause 3+/- - Increase/decrease speed of stars and music 40-9 - Set star pattern 5[/] - Previous/next star color smoothly 6{/} - Previous/next star color roughly 7Down/Right/Enter - Next song 8Up/Left - Previous song 9F - Fade out music 10R - Restart music 11S - Stop music 12W - Pulsate music (Weird) 13Space - Toggle text on/off 14/ - Toggle music/sound effects 15,/. - Previous/next sound effect 16; - Play sound effect
Quite interesting to hear how the music sounds, played using various old MIDI devices/FM synth/GUS/etc... and I love watching all of the pretty colors swirling around <grin> 😀
I am Heretic's and HeXen's fan =). Like to hear music from these games in various Sound Emulations.
How to swith it to Gravis Ultrasound? Or where get this utilities?
IIRC, in the afore-mentioned games, I may have had to set the digital sound device to Sound Blaster, and then the music device to GUS. Going from memory here, I seem to recall problems when both the digital and music devices were set to GUS at the same time.
That's because DMX sucks 😀
GUS Doom issues were all over usenet in the day because of that. 😀
Last edited by leileilol on 2016-01-26, 15:06. Edited 1 time in total.
GUS Doom issues were all over usenet in the day because of that. 😀
I never knew that before. Heh, I guess that DOSBox's GUS emulation is even truer to real-world than I first thought <G> 😀
RaVeN-05 wrote:
I am Heretic's and HeXen's fan =). Like to hear music from these games in various Sound Emulations. How to swith it to Gravis Ultrasound? Or where get this utilities?
After aquiring the GUS patches, ensure that they are located on your hard drive somewhere where DOSBox can find them (e.g.):
"C:\DOSGAMES\ULTRASND\MIDI", and under the "[gus]" section of your "DOSBox.conf" file, the line "ultradir=C:\ULTRASND".
Then after the usual "MOUNT C C:\DOSGAMES" sort of thing, all you have to do is to run DOOM/DOOM2/Heretic/Hexen/Strife's SETUP.EXE, and select the GUS for the music device 😀
PLAYMIDI is the only utility that works for me... I tried with Doom and Doom II and music didn't work 🙁
IIRC, in the afore-mentioned games, I may have had to set the digital sound device to Sound Blaster, and then the music device to GUS. Going from memory here, I seem to recall problems when both the digital and music devices were set to GUS at the same time.
I have tried it, too, but it still didn't work. And I even tried to change the GUS interrupt address for avoiding conflicts. 🙁
There's a huge thread somewhere on VOGONS with detailed info on how to install GUS stuff in DOSBox, with links to all drivers etc. .
I have owned two different GUS cards back in the DOS days, and I never was happy with them. Consequently I can't really understand the fuss about these cards. The GUS had some nice features, but for gaming a SB clone (or later the SB16/Wavetable combo, external MIDI modules were always too expensive for me) was always the "better" choice in that it just worked without having to deal with a shitload of drivers and incompatibilities. For DOSBox i'm using Timidity with a selection of Soundfonts - neither the original GUS patches nor Pro Patches Lite can come close to a decent modern soundfont in terms of sample quality. I do have all the GUS stuff setup for DOSBox just in case though (; .
I have owned two different GUS cards back in the DOS days, and I never was happy with them. Consequently I can't really understand the fuss about these cards. The GUS had some nice features, but for gaming a SB clone (or later the SB16/Wavetable combo, external MIDI modules were always too expensive for me) was always the "better" choice in that it just worked without having to deal with a shitload of drivers and incompatibilities.
I have to agree with you on that - I owned a GUS Max and the music was incredible...for games that supported it. Very few of the games I owned did. Most of the demos and mod players had GUS options but if I wanted to play games I had to deal with GUS' sound blaster emulation which was pathetic. The shitload of drivers needed which reduced your base memory available was another downside.
I ended up putting in an SB AWE32 and was happy. 😀
Oh and I forgot to add - DOSBOX GUS emulation is awesome!!
some games support gus, but not general midi/roland
that is what gus emulation is for
Examples?
I can imagine GUS-only demos because the GUS was quite big in the demo scene IIRC. But games? Why would a developer/publisher limit the number of potential buyers by supporting only one particular sound card that has a minimal install base compared to that of the de-facto standard (=Soundblaster + GM/Roland)? Especially since the implementation(s) would be quite similar across the supported hardware, in terms of MIDI.
