It's difficult to provide an answer, since I'm not entirely clear what your problem is, nor wat causes it.

First of all, there's a configuration section in the DOSBox config file (dosbox.conf) that describes whether DOSBox should emulate a GUS, and if so, what settings to use. Could you please post what you have sitting there?

Secondly, some games, and I'm not sure whether these are the games you mention, use the GUS's sound patches to produce sound on the GUS. These are not on-board, but on your harddisk as files. If you do not have these files, it may well be the games cannot play sound through the emulated GUS.

Thirdly, you speak about MIDI. Iirc, the GUS has both a MIDI port and could emulate MIDI with some driver loaded, but I don't think DOSBox emulates the port (which would be useless anyway, as a real MIDI device must be connected to it), and the MIDI emulation is, iirc, setup by a driver or tool supplied with the GUS. If you do not have the software for that, you're out of luck as well.

JAL

Be sure you added gus=true and ultradir=your GUS path (normally C:\ULTRASND) to GUS section of your dosbox.conf file and gusbase, irq1, irq2, dma1, dma2 are all not conflict with corresponding values in sblaster section (or better turn sound blaster off with sbtype=none); all these things get much easier when using front end like D-Fend Reloaded.

Many GUS supported games need you to initialize GUS first (load instrument patch, etc.), how can that be done is individual to the game; for example with Witchaven 1&2 you need to run GRAVIS.EXE first; Hocus pocus, run __HPGRVS.EXE.

Games like Warcraft II, Duke Nukem 3D need no special manual initialization, with the correct DOSBox settings you can set it up to use GUS easily. But these games need to know exactly where are GUS initialization files; so you must be sure that you set up GUS files correctly and provide the exact path to ultradir= in dosbox.conf.

jal wrote:

It's difficult to provide an answer, since I'm not entirely clear what your problem is, nor wat causes it. […]
Show full quote

It's difficult to provide an answer, since I'm not entirely clear what your problem is, nor wat causes it.

First of all, there's a configuration section in the DOSBox config file (dosbox.conf) that describes whether DOSBox should emulate a GUS, and if so, what settings to use. Could you please post what you have sitting there?

Secondly, some games, and I'm not sure whether these are the games you mention, use the GUS's sound patches to produce sound on the GUS. These are not on-board, but on your harddisk as files. If you do not have these files, it may well be the games cannot play sound through the emulated GUS.

Thirdly, you speak about MIDI. Iirc, the GUS has both a MIDI port and could emulate MIDI with some driver loaded, but I don't think DOSBox emulates the port (which would be useless anyway, as a real MIDI device must be connected to it), and the MIDI emulation is, iirc, setup by a driver or tool supplied with the GUS. If you do not have the software for that, you're out of luck as well.
JAL

Settings from the general .conf file you mentioned from DOSBox root (not from any game folder, as I use a template on DBGL which generates it's own conf file for each game) are following:

[gus]
# gus -- Enable the Gravis Ultrasound emulation.
# gusbase,irq1,irq2,dma1,dma2 -- The IO/IRQ/DMA addresses of the
# Gravis Ultrasound. (Same IRQ's and DMA's are OK.)
# gusrate -- Sample rate of Ultrasound emulation.
# ultradir -- Path to Ultrasound directory. In this directory
# there should be a MIDI directory that contains
# the patch files for GUS playback. Patch sets used
# with Timidity should work fine.

gus=true
gusrate=22050
gusbase=240
irq1=5
irq2=5
dma1=3
dma2=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND <- this is wrong

Contents from a template / DBGL generated .conf from a game's folder. Includes the right ULTRASND directory:

Warcraft - Orcs and Humans.conf

[gus]
gusrate=48000
ultradir=c:\users\janne\ultrasnd\ultrasndppl161

With GUS sound patches do you mean sound patches apllied to the game or to the card it self? I think that the file I downloaded from the first site ('guide') I mentioned states that most available patches for the card have been implied. There's a thread actually in this forum about the making of such file I downloaded, here:

Install Gravis Ultrasound Properly, All files, No Errors (With Pictures!)

Hope this helps 🙄

Vinx wrote:

Be sure you added gus=true and ultradir=your GUS path (normally C:\ULTRASND) to GUS section of your dosbox.conf file and gusbase, irq1, irq2, dma1, dma2 are all not conflict with corresponding values in sblaster section (or better turn sound blaster off with sbtype=none); all these things get much easier when using front end like D-Fend Reloaded.

Many GUS supported games need you to initialize GUS first (load instrument patch, etc.), how can that be done is individual to the game; for example with Witchaven 1&2 you need to run GRAVIS.EXE first; Hocus pocus, run __HPGRVS.EXE.

Games like Warcraft II, Duke Nukem 3D need no special manual initialization, with the correct DOSBox settings you can set it up to use GUS easily. But these games need to know exactly where are GUS initialization files; so you must be sure that you set up GUS files correctly and provide the exact path to ultradir= in dosbox.conf.

I am actually using a frontend (DBGL and sometimes D.O.G) which I have configured to point to the right ultrasound directory, so there should be no problem with that 😒 The GRAVIS.EXE you mention; should I look for it in the game folder or from the ULTRASND folder?

ultradir=c:\users\janne\ultrasnd\ultrasndppl161

This is certainly wrong, paths are supposed to be relative to the mountings.

wd wrote:

ultradir=c:\users\janne\ultrasnd\ultrasndppl161

This is certainly wrong, paths are supposed to be relative to the mountings.

Okay, I DO have the files in that specific folder, but if using a frontend like DBGL, shound't it handle the .conf for me? If not, what should I do? I have used D.O.G frontend a couple of times, and it generates a following .conf file into the game directory:

[dosbox]
language=
machine=vga
captures=d:\dosbox-0.72\warcraft
memsize=32

[gus]
gus=true
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
irq1=5
irq2=5
dma1=3
dma2=3
ultradir=y:\

...

[autoexec]
mount y "c:\users\janne\ultrasnd\ultrasndppl161"
mount x "d:\dosbox-0.72"
X:
cd/
cd warcraft
war.exe
exit

It doesn't look like Warcraft 1 or Dune II support the GUS...
This might be related to the GUS' MIDI capabilities (ultramid) which are not emulated by DOSBox.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

It doesn't look like Warcraft 1 or Dune II support the GUS...
This might be related to the GUS' MIDI capabilities (ultramid) which are not emulated by DOSBox.

Ah, okay well that explains a lot. Thank you 😀 Only exception is The Settlers II now, working it out..

but if using a frontend like DBGL, shound't it handle the .conf for me?

Don't know, if the dosbox.conf you posted is what DBGL uses untranslated
it won't work, but maybe somebody who uses DBGL can tell.

There's an easy way to check if a DOS game supports GUS; run its setup program, look for something like "choose sound FX card", activate it and look for "Gravis Ultrasound" in the list (GUS Max might not be supported by DOSBox)--
- If there is no such an item, the game might not support GUS (except it needs a special way to activate GUS first )
- If it's there, try configure it with port, IRQ and DMA that you specified in dosbox.conf, or simply choose "autodetect" (if there's any) -- if correct configuration and/or autodetection fails, it's very probably you need to find a special way to initialize GUS first.

Again, for games that need such special method, look for any .EXE file that the name seems related to GUS in game folder and run it before running setup or the game itself; you can create a batch file for starting game.
For example, This is my batch file for Hocus Pocus:-
@ultramid -q
@__hpgrvs -- my mistake for mention this as GUS initializer in my last post, in fact, it's the game file
@ultramid -q -f
as you can see, this game use a separated program file that utilize GUS, there may be other game utilize GUS in this way too.

for more information look at-
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/sc-gus.htm

Warcraft or Dune II (your game?) doesn't directly support GUS, you seem to need a patch as mentioned in the page (URL above). The page also link to many intersting site such as GUS Emulator's home and ftp site that you may need to look for such a patch.

I'm trying to get Daggerfall (the free version released by Bethesda) to work with DOSBox's GUS emulation. I downloaded the "fully updated ultrasnd folder" archive from this thread: Install Gravis Ultrasound Properly, All files, No Errors (With Pictures!) . I uncompressed the archive and renamed ULTRASND411 to ULTRASND and put it in the folder that I mount as c:\ in DOSBox (so that it will be c:\ultrasnd). I turned off mpu401 and SB emulation and turned on GUS emulation in dosbox.conf.

In the SETUP.EXE sound setup util for Daggerfall, it autodetects the GUS fine as the preferred digital device. When I run the Test however, it sounds kind of choppy.

Even worse, when I select GUS for MIDI it says it can't detect the device. I noticed it only lets you choose port 220 for the GUS MIDI, so I tried both editing dosbox.conf to use 220 for GUS and tried going back to 240 and hacking the HMISET.CFG to use 240 instead of 220; neither attempt made any difference. I also tried GUS Max and GUS Ace for MIDI options with the same result.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

This might be related to the GUS' MIDI capabilities (ultramid) which are not emulated by DOSBox.

What about the mididemo that comes with Ultrasound software? It works great in dosbox.

There seem to be some issues with the HMI drivers for GUS digital and MIDI with Daggerfall. The digital sound is oddly distorted (sounds better at some specific cycles, but doesn't completely clear up), and the MIDI driver won't load at all. I tried pre-loading patches by running "ultramid -c" in the ULTRASND dir, but that doesn't appear to help the HMI driver. The Daggerfall patch to version 1.07.213 doesn't update the drivers, and the issues remain.

There are other games with HMI drivers that work with the GUS emulation well enough, so the issue seems to be with the specific drivers included in Daggerfall.

I've never compared the CPU usage of GUS MIDI to OPL emulation... is it much less?

In theory at least, GUS music should take little effort to emulate because it just involves mixing of sound samples.

I wonder if Daggerfall works on a real GUS?

I also wonder if it's possible to use the HMI drivers from another game to get it working with DOSBox? Probably not worth it.

I couldn't get my real GUS to work with the downloaded Daggerfall.
Digital playback was "bubbling"/stuttering in the sound test. Worked with a SB Pro.
MIDI won't initialize, neither with nor without ultramid loaded.

I couldn't start the game as it didn't like my self-made CD.

Same with my GUS.
Same with my GUS Max, although digital playback is ok when i choose Max.