Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-01-08, 16:23:
darry wrote on 2023-01-08, 03:48:
IMHO, like 3dfx hardware, reality does not really live up to the legend for Gravis hardware .
At least early 3dfx cards were more useful than a GUS overall even during its heyday, their drivers were the most optimized ones for slower computers.
From a gaming perspective, a standalone GUS was never that great, but combine a GUS with Sound Blaster clone and you had a good thing going, IMHO. MegaEM for MIDI was decent and rather reliable in its later iterations (it could even work with protected mode games if your GUS rev was 3 or newer ). This was the preferred setup for pretty much all GUS owners that I knew back in the day.
If one was a demo scene fan, the GUS was very useful indeed. Mine got a lot use that way .
Another thing to keep in mind is that 3dfx hardware become affordable rather quickly while style being pretty much the fastest and best looking (image quality) 3D accelerator in the consumer segment at launch (and stayed a very strong contender for a while).
In contrast, the GUS was never "the best" at anything except hardware mixing. It was never really good at sound blaster compatibility and while it had a decent patchset and patch caching ability, it had no real FX engine (until the Interwave based ones came about, and that sounded rather cheesy, IMHO). The Roland SC-55 was much better for MIDI (albeit only ROM based) and had a great FX engine . However, the SC-55 cost 795$ US (list price) in 1992 according to [1], whereas a GUS was 199$ US (list price) (street price as low as 130$ US) according to [2] at around the same time. Also, were there many other GM compatible alternatives in 1992 in the GUS' price range that at least provided some degree of sound blaster compatibility and General MIDI support ?
IMHO, that made the GUS quite useful and affordable, at least until Creative Labs mostly caught up .
[1]
https://books.google.ca/books?id=a2YTCyIAwwIC … 20sc-55&f=false
[2]
https://books.google.ca/books?id=RjY3gFmnC8UC … rasound&f=false