I played around with QEMM and remembered why I don't like it... cubix just crashed with qemm 🤣 🤣 🤣
Already made a setup with ocp/xtc and ~550 amiga game mods , working great in native gus mode.
I am also dual-booting this machine , DOS and 98SE (in different partitions) that's why I have 128MB installed. tbh it's only megaem that craps out that badly, everything else works fine if you reserve ram with xmsdsk , it can also be configured to leave the first 16mb free 😀

Great Hierophant wrote:

Reading how many GUSes that guy had to go through to get a working one was depressing. I sometimes see them go for decent prices from places like Hungary or the Czech Republic or the Russian Federation, but they seem a bit too good to be true.

I got a GUS ACE in order to limit the difficulties. In that respect it works very well.

A GUS ACE is still sucepitlbe to being DOA or no longer working at any time. I spoke to a handful of fellows over at Pouet that had ACE cards and switched to PnP after the ACE would start locking up their machine or no longer detecting.

The ones I purchased that were dead typically came from the USA.

Thanks to everyone who read my post at virtuallyfun. It's been a long time coming and I felt like someone should have documented the experience for another person on vogon who might get into GUS cards.

That applies to just about every electronic computer component ever made. And just because you had a bad luck spell with GUS cards doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to consider one for a retro-build - I've had bad experiences with both Maxtor hard drives an Pentium 3 CPUs, yet I don't malign them at every opportunity I get 😐

The cards are not awful by any means. I am just stating that they are a lot more finnicky to even initialize or be detected properly. I wasn't the only person who had this problem, check old usenet posts of comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard.advocacy to see all kinds of problems related to these cards. I feel like the biggest problem of why they may not work is the earlier cards were seated in sockets and maybe if they sat for a long time and it's not making pure contact something would kill that chip from an improper connection... though I can't prove this.

Either way, they are an awesome sounding card.

I think the guy was just unlucky. I have 4 GUS cards. 2 Classics, an ACE and a PnP. The PnP just arrived my folks house in Portugal a few days ago where i have all my retro stuff packed and secure for when i return. I'll test it when i return on vacations, but for the other three cards i got i was only sure that the ACE was working because the guy guaranteed me it was. Still, stuff can go wrong during shipping and these cards can die. The classics were gambles and the risk payed off.

Unless an actual specific chip is damaged and is hard to get/replaced and is not socketed for instance these cards usually are very fixable. Most common problems are capacitors. Which are easy to replace. I believe cards can last forever if properly handled and maintened. Electromigration is a huge concern in chips, but again if everything is operating in parameters these things can last a life.

Another possible issue is how extremely large the cards were that some sort of stress might be building up over years and ruining some connection on board. A year ago I restored some 1970s TV set that had "module" pcbs for the various functions and I had this problem with the colour working intermittently and it ended up being from sitting in the socket for so many years and slight heat build up that a connection got loose and once the TV was on for an hour or more it must have heated up just enough to make the contact.

Also regarding the post about capacitors. I did replace those, tried reflowing solder joints, disabling FDC, serial ports, removing all peripherals except the video card, keyboard and sound card. Tested them in multiple machines, multiple slots, etc. etc.

I got lucky in that one card I swapped out the GF1 socketed IC from the GUS MAX that would never detect properly and it allowed that card to work again.

Hey guys-

I popped in my GUS Classic 3.73 w/1MB this weekend but I'm having some problems getting it to work. The card's base address is configured (via jumper) to 240. The IRQs and DMAs are set to 7, tested successfully via the setup utility. The card's base address was also tested successfully, and the 1MB of memory as well.

4.11 drivers are installed to C:\DRIVERS\GUS

My GUS.bat is configured with:
SET ULTRASND=240,7,7,7,7
SET ULTRADIR=C:\DRIVERS\GUS
C:\DRIVERS\GUS\ULTRINIT.EXE -dj

My SB16 is configured with:
SET CTCM=C:\DRIVERS\CTCM
SET SOUND=C:\DRIVERS\SB16
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
C:\DRIVERS\SB16\DIAGNOSE.EXE /S
C:\DRIVERS\SB16\MIXERSET.EXE /P /Q
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0

I tried running the C:\DRIVERS\GUS\MIDIDEMO.BAT, but I get "Error on patch info call for **** : DOS ERROR.

Also, silly question, which is the correct audio-port on the back of the Classic 3.73 ver?

Disregard... (sigh). My MIDI subdirectory was missing the patches. FTP file transfer FAIL.

Your problem seems like a software setup one, if you play a game like DOOM with GUS music, does it work? mididemo.bat just plays a bunch of demo midis that sound good on the gus, nothing special 🤣
for reference here are the lines in my autoexec.bat that activate both CT-2230+GUS:

1SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P300 T6
2C:\SB16\DIAGNOSE /S
3C:\SB16\MIXERSET /P /Q
4SET ULTRASND=240,3,3,3,3
5SET ULTRADIR=C:\GUS
6C:\GUS\ultrinit.exe -dl -dm -dc -dj

You do have a GUS\MIDI directory that has *pat files inside, right?

Regarding the ports on the back, tbh both sound the same to me. I use the one next to the joystick port as it seems to be less amplified than the port in the edge, but the difference in volume is SO LITTLE! I even thought that there was something wrong with the other port that is supposedly "amplified" but I didn't bother to investigate more since the sound comes out OK.

edit: 🤣 just saw the followup post, it was indeed missing patch files 😊

So after correcting my mistake I fired up Epic Pinball and WOW - the native GUS support is amazing! DOOM sounds pretty ok but DOOM 2 sounds hellish - not sure what's up with that. I'm running the Pro Patches Lite 1.61 package as well.

Is there any kind of mixer utility for this? The UltraMix.exe shows the levels all at 0, which looks like their max? Zone66 sounds REALLY quiet while other games sound fine.

Yeah, don't expect the GUS to perform great in all titles when midi is involved, I can confirm your DOOM/DOOM2 observation.
I can also confirm the volume fluctuation between programs , I use an external mixer to bypass this problem... it's really needed with sb + external midi devices as well so it's a wise investment 😉

You really need to get ProPatches Lite 1.60 then patch it to 1.61 http://dk.toastednet.org/GUS/MIDI%20PATCHES/P … hesLite1.61.zip and then get http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?fi … ounds/gus1m.zip for Doom 1 and http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?fi … ic/gus1mIId.zip for Doom 2. Then it will really sound awesome.

Also you cannot adjust the volume on a GUS Classic unless its v3.7 or later as those have the ICS Mixer chip.

keropi wrote:

Yeah, don't expect the GUS to perform great in all titles when midi is involved, I can confirm your DOOM/DOOM2 observation.
I can also confirm the volume fluctuation between programs , I use an external mixer to bypass this problem... it's really needed with sb + external midi devices as well so it's a wise investment 😉

Interesting. Any recommendations on a cheap mixer?

Maraakate wrote:

Also you cannot adjust the volume on a GUS Classic unless its v3.7 or later as those have the ICS Mixer chip.

Thanks for the info! I do have a 3.73 Rev card. I cant wait to hear those pwads - awesome!

Artex wrote:

Interesting. Any recommendations on a cheap mixer?

I use the Roland MX-5

Artex wrote:

Interesting. Any recommendations on a cheap mixer?

none from me tbh, I was searching eBay for quite some time to get my XFade VL-303A

you can go crazy with getting a behringer mixer or something but personally I don't like how they look and they are an overkill for my setup... nothing beats a quality old-fashioned mixer for me 🤣 🤣 🤣

The advantages are great with a mixer, you can adjust soundblaster and midi volumes on the fly without having to worry about imbalanced sounding in game. On my setup I have the SB on the 1st input, the GUS on the 2nd and the external midi modules on the 3rd , they are connected via an audio selector so each time only one of them reach the mixer.
Make sure the mixer you are getting comes with it's own original PSU since chances are it will be more suited for it over the generic ones that are not "sound specific".

edit: Roland MX-5 ... that's a great one! 😊

If you want to go overkill you can do something like this (my setup). Gives full control over multiple computers and multiple MIDI devices:

Wow! Nice work there Vetz. I wish I had room to leave all of my stuff out. 😜

Alrighty guys.. I think I need some additional clarification on these Pro Patches Lite packages. I downloaded the 1.60 and 1.61 upgrade zips, and ran through the instructions bundled inside.

Here's what I did:

* Installed the full 4.11 GUS driver package to C:\DRIVERS\GUS and I can see the default patches in the \MIDI subdirectory
* Card is working fine at 240,7,7,7,7 - outputting from the GUS Classic to the line-input of my SB16 (Non-PNP)
* Extracted the Pro Patches Lite 1.60 files into a directory -> C:\DRIVERS\GUS\PATCHES
* Added "SET PROPATS=C:\DRIVERS\GUS\PATCHES" to my AutoExec.bat and rebooted
* Ran C:\DRIVERS\GUS\PATCHES\Install.exe and got a bunch of "bad command or file name" lines, but it did do a bunch of processing on some patches

Is this right so far? If not, please instruct me. If so, how do I get the 1.61 patch to apply?

Secondly, I did copy the DOOM1 and DOOM2 .WAD files and am loading each with the following command lines:

DOOM.exe -FILE GUS1M.WAD
DOOM2.exe -FILE GUS1MIID.WAD

But the music sounds the same to me, regardless of whether or not I use the .WAD?