I have stated way back at the beginning that I will be able to assemble cards for people - as long as it's not 100 cards 🤣 - provided people send me the needed parts and cover all expenses related to the assembly. There is a basket from Phreeze some pages back that works well . It is weird in my country to order parts (yes really!) and some good people are helping me on that regard but I don't want to stress them with extra work and take advantage of them.
There are some long-standing members already on the assembly list and there is still room for more as long as people are reasonable. 😀

it's in my signature ^^ missing the ROM only, you can get an IW-Rom from UTsource. takes some time, but works 😀
people trying to sell gus cards for over 300$ don't want to sell them but just put them up. If some derp is crazy enough to buy it at that price, they win and got too much cash^^

keropi wrote:

There is a basket from Phreeze some pages back that works well .

I just had a look at that list for the first time. I didn't check everything, but one thing that I noticed was that the crystals don't seem to have matching capacitors. The original BOM specified 22 pF, which seems to have been preserved, while neither crystal actually seems to call for that value. Am I missing something? It could be that it doesn't make a practical difference, but I thought it was interesting.

Hi everyone, all caught up on the 30 odd pages since I last posted. Cool to see the prototypes coming to life!
Good find for the rom chips on UTSource, I've ordered a few in advance ready for the production run. Just looking at this parts list on Mouser and the 2.2uF caps (GRM21BR61H225KA73L) are sadly out of stock and marked as end of life by the manufacturer so looks like a replacement is needed. I'll take a look and report back if I find a suitable substitute. Thanks for all the great work!

you will always may find some out of stock parts, in the different baskets posted, mostly there's a substitute.

For the sake of curiosity, I have butchered my card a little further. Unhappy with not having a definitive answer about the SIMM organisation issue, I cut the RAS# traces leading to the SIMM socket, re-connected the lines for the first rank/"side" of the module with bodge wires, and used pull-up resistors for the other. This should have the effect of forcing the second rank to remain mostly idle, never dumping anything onto the memory bus.

The result is that the same amount of memory is detected, and the SIMMs generally seem to remain somewhat cooler. As far as I can tell, we lose nothing, as the InterWave doesn't directly provide a way to make use of dual-rank SIMMs (no capacity is lost).

One thing I have noticed since disabling PnP-compliant mode is that the Gravis setup utility will not run, claiming that it can't find the card. This could be because it detects a PnP-compliant BIOS, so maybe the problem will disappear on older machines. It could also be that I need to revise the circuit used to disable PnP support, which I will try when I have time. The important thing will be to get feedback from someone with an actual non-PnP system, since the official system requirements call for a 386 as the minimum, and there are no plug-and-play 386 machines, as far as I know.

EDIT: I just tried disabling PnP on a genuine Gravis card (by fitting JP9), and the behaviour is the same on my system; SETUP.EXE refuses to run.

This is how I imagine 640k!enough's Argus Prototype :

Afterall that's what a development prototype is supposed to look like 😉
Really excited to reproduce his developments on my card and very likely add them to the next revsion once I have access to my prototype again (flat is getting a new kitchen and bathroom which is why I'm at an alternatve place).

If one of you could gather all info and send it via PM or E-Mail that would be largely appreciated as I'm currently only able to follow the thread on my smartphone.

damn your workers are pretty slow ^^ my kitchen was ready in 4 days hehe (paint + whole kitchen)

5 weeks for the bathroom ... regarding the kitchen they haven't done a lot yet except for taking away the gas stove and putting in a 16A jack for the new electric stove.

Kinda annoying.

Synoptic wrote:

This is how I imagine 640k!enough's Argus Prototype :

It's not quite that bad yet, but I'm working on it. 😉

The way I see it, that's the reason we have these prototypes. Even if mine ends its existence by going up in smoke, if it helps create a more reliable, stable and/or feature-rich end product, it will have been worth the risk. Someone has to be the stubborn perfectionist, and for now, that's me.

My card is almoast done!!! I can't wait to test it.
I'll have to deliver my friend who solder it memories to solder and kindly ask him to solder other midi connection... because this one has fixed screws mouting and I won't be able to fit bracket...

i replaced my midi connector yesterday as i got my new desoldering station. my card is completely finished but midi under windows 95 has either missing instruments or the instruments are just digital "crap" (sound like BRRZRRRZRZZR). I used the win95 gus pnp driver pack with original 1MB set. Need to test with another set perhaps. I used the windows media player and chose some classical midi that comes with win95 Under DOS, at least duke3d and darkforces setup sounds good

EDIT: I removed the initial draft. A slightly revised version can be found here.

Even though it's an incomplete early draft, I thought I'd share the documentation for the current prototype ROM modules. I expect that there will be at least two people interested in reading some of this.

I know that some of the formatting needs to be fixed, and I haven't even fully read through it yet, so it may be rather rough. Nonetheless, any feedback is welcome. The sections on the programmer board, programming adaptor and programming software should be ready soon.

Just crossread the documentation - seems nicely laid out and written well. I'll give it a comprehensive read after the 23th when I'm back at my flat.

A short note, ARGUS stands for advanced reverse-engineered GUS - being a partial/stacked acronym 😉 Copyright reasons you know (and well, I refer to Gravis UltraSound cards mostly as GUS/GUSes)

I now getting a 3D Printer, maybe i can contribute soon with a 3D Printed Bracklet for the ARGUS 😀

Nice work, i really like the ROM Module .

i wanted to ask if you can add another Audio In with a Header.
So we can Design Addon Board which will connect to the ARGUS ISA Bus Header, maybe a OPL3 Board or OPL2, Tandy Audio Board etc.

i already made one ^^ just have to put it on Thinkercad and print the slot again, as i think the last one was off by 0.1mm for one or the other connector 😀
I'll send it to you so you can thinker around

I had a little more time to work on the documentation for the ROM modules. I still haven't thoroughly proofread yet, but I think this version should be more clear and somewhat better organised. I still haven't written the sections on programming the modules, but hope to have time to do that over the next few days.

EDIT: Attachment removed; newer version here

I'm printing the bracklet now 😀

Thanks for the STL File @jigo.

I will post pictures later.

A bit work is still required. Alligment of Holes for Audio is not 100% correct.