VOGONS


First post, by Great Hierophant

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What need is there for a Gravis Ultrasound in a retro system if you have DOSBox? I believ that there is not much need for the card if your DOSBox system is fast enough to handle any VGA game without difficulty. For true SVGA & VESA games (which do not include tweaked VGA games like Extreme Pinball), whose system requirements for smooth gameplay in DOSBox can bring the mightiest of modern systems to its knees. I suggest that by the time that SVGA resolutions were becoming the norm, the Ultrasound's support wasn't what it used to be. Also, companies simply supported it as an 8/16-bit DAC and for sample-based general midi when not being shoehorned into an emulated OPL.

Reply 1 of 5, by keropi

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I never really liked the ultrasound cards... always read about patches, probs, etc back then... though they were quite advanced, they were never used to their 100% power, IMHO...

Reply 2 of 5, by 5u3

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If you only interested in games, the value of a GUS is quite low, considering the little number of games that support it. And as you both have already stated, the capabilities of a GUS were never really used in games.
However, it's a completely different story with scene demos, because of two reasons:
1) GUS was THE standard in the scene, there are a lot of demos that won't run without a GUS, and the quality of the GUS hardware support is very high.
2) Because of heavy tweaking, even very old demos run poorly in DOSBox.

Reply 4 of 5, by 5u3

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Great Hierophant wrote:

2) Because of heavy tweaking, even very old demos run poorly in DOSBox.

I would think that most of those demos were for 386 and 486 machines, not for Pentiums.

Correct. In the Pentium era, demos moved away from using VGA register tweaks as well as only supporting GUS for sound.

Reply 5 of 5, by samudra

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The output quality of the GUS is higher than any of the cards Creative made during that period.

I am one of those people who have a GUS because of the scene, but when playing a game, and having the choice between my GUS or SB16, the GUS will be the card I use.

One heard much (and still) about frequency and 8/16-bit (now 24-bit and so on), but that all means nothing if the quality of the output is seriously lacking, due to low-cost parts.

In the end it is something you'll have to hear and decide for yourself.