Would it be even remotely doable? GUS prices have gone batshit insane in last 10 years but AWE's can be still bought at sensible prices. EMU8000 on AWE is much more capable as a synthesizer, but of course completely different, so some kind of TSR would need to go in between.
Of course most games and demos support Sound Blaster natively, but software mixing usually sucks.
A friend of mine was giving it a thought but I'm not sure it will ever get anywhere, it isn't a straightforward thing to do.
T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜
btw. I think in "later" pentium1/2 systems a gus is obsolete.
the gus is "the" 386/486 dos-soundcard. what do you think? (though it has some win95 drivers)
Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines
In most cases GUS acts as a wavetable device, so it could be a matter of recreating patches in a soundfont, I guess? I think there were some attempts to do this (1 and 2), but I haven't tried them.
There's of course also the hardware sound mixing and cleaner sound output in some cases, but there are very few games that support it, and in most cases an SB16/AWE can do the same, but it will sound a bit poorer.
Are there any games that support GUS but not AWE32 anyway? People seem to be really interested in this and I can't see why, GUS wavetable isn't THAT much better than the AWE wavetable.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
I think the GUS is only really interesting for demos and trackers. Maybe for the early Epic games like Jazz Jackrabbit or OMF, because they also use tracker music. But other than that I think it's not very useful. For MIDI I would rather use the SC55, or some other external synth or one of the many Waveblaster compatible modules.
Most of the demo productions will probably not play along with a TSR that emulates the GUS anyway...
wrote:In most cases GUS acts as a wavetable device, so it could be a matter of recreating patches in a soundfont, I guess? I think there were some attempts to do this (1 and 2), but I haven't tried them.
There's of course also the hardware sound mixing and cleaner sound output in some cases, but there are very few games that support it, and in most cases an SB16/AWE can do the same, but it will sound a bit poorer.
GUS midi sound set is not worth emulating IMO. There are better soundfonts that actually take advantage of the features of EMU8000.
Almost all DOS demos preferably use GUS to play tracker music. Also at least Epic used tracker music in most of their games. I don't remember games that could use the EMU8000 for anything but midi music, there might have been few but usually even if there was AWE32 option in setup, it was used just as a SB16 and software mixed without interpolation. Granted, many games with middleware drivers did mixing in software with GUS also.
wrote:Are there any games that support GUS but not AWE32 anyway?
Games, probably not.
Demos/trackers/other scene-related software, most certainly.
There are quite a few demos that have no music at all, or do not even run, if you do not have a GUS.
AWE32 wasn't ever widely supported in the scene (other than using it as an SB16-compatible card).
Problem is, that is also the most difficult category to emulate: they use DOS-extenders, sometimes even their own, which generally means it won't be compatible with EMM386 for virtualizing and redirecting GUS ports and other I/O.
wrote:Are there any games that support GUS but not AWE32 anyway?
Yes, many - GUS came before AWE32, and was easier to support in software.
See eg. the original Doom release: GUS supported natively, but AWE32 only works as a SB16.
Native AWE32 was added later, in the Ultimate Doom.
People seem to be really interested in this and I can't see why, GUS wavetable isn't THAT much better than the AWE wavetable.
Hardware-wise, GUS is worse than AWE32.
But there was plenty of software taking advantage of GUS, but not of AWE32.
Edit:
GUS emulation isn't a new idea, see eg. http://deinmeister.de/gusemu/ - and I reckon there was some other emulator even earlier...
Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...
wrote:Yes, many - GUS came before AWE32, and was easier to support in software.
See eg. the original Doom release: GUS supported natively, but AWE32 only works as a SB16.
Native AWE32 was added later, in the Ultimate Doom.
Yes but it was added nonetheless. Are there any high profile games that warrant this mad demand for GUS cards?
Hardware-wise, GUS is worse than AWE32.
But there was plenty of software taking advantage of GUS, but not of AWE32.
Just what are these mythical software that I can't seem to find?
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
wrote:See eg. the original Doom release: GUS supported natively, but AWE32 only works as a SB16.
Native AWE32 was added later, in the Ultimate Doom.
The AWE32 was released in March 1994. So of course the original DOOM release from December 1993 had no support for it. I'm pretty sure support was added long before Ultimate Doom, however. When I had an AWE64 at some point, I played DOOM with native support, but I never had Ultimate Doom.
wrote:Just what are these mythical software that I can't seem to find?
I think two of the most legendary trackers for MS-DOS may be a good example?
FastTracker II and ScreamTracker 3.
There is a GUS-Emulator for Win9x but I never got it to work with the "problematic" soundengines (Duke3d, Swarrior) on y i815e Motherboard with an ESS-PCI Card.
The GUS is a really fantastic soundcard for a 386/486, but actually I think the onboard crystal-codec on my PentiumMMX Motherboard is the best I ever heard.
Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines
wrote:Are there any high profile games that warrant this mad demand for GUS cards?
See the following:
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,20/1992/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,20/1993/
https://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,1/ti,20/1994/
In that era, GUS support was common in games, AWE support - not yet.
Anyway, while for gamers a GUS may be optional, for those interested in demoscene it's a must-have - there's plenty of demos with GUS as the only supported sound card, see eg. the unforgettable Dope...
Edit:
Finding such info on MobyGames isn't easy, but possible - I've listed all GUS-supporting games from 1992-95, copied the lists to a text file, did the same for AWE32, and then ran diff on both files - this way I've found 135 games with GUS support, but no AWE32.
And there may be some more such games in later years, but not many.
Żywotwór planetarny, jego gnijące błoto, jest świtem egzystencji, fazą wstępną, i wyłoni się z krwawych ciastomózgowych miedź miłująca...
Epic Mega Games always favored the GUS so it's on my wish list and games such as Zone 66 had a different soundtrack.
but the small list of games and large price of a GUS means it'll probably never happen.
Regardless of how much one may love the AWE32, let's be honest about this: the UltraSound was the first mass-market "wavetable" sound card that delivered decent sound and didn't cost a fortune. It is arguably the reason the AWE line existed at all. Love it or despise it, the historical significance of the UltraSound is undeniable.
As already mentioned, the idea of running GUS software using a card with an on-board EMU8000 as a replacement may seem natural, but would not be easy. Architecturally, the two are quite different. On the MIDI side, their instrument formats are sufficiently different that there is no simple sure-fire way to automatically convert from one to the other and be sure to get decent sound. More generally, their methods of interpolation, constraints on memory layout and alignment, and methods of avoiding clicks during playback are all quite different. Designing a TSR that would successfully account for all of these differences at all, much less seamlessly, would be quite a challenge.
Then, if we're discussing this because the objective is running the many GUS-only demos, we run into even more complications. Many of the people who write those things are fantastic at grabbing the hardware "by the ears" and getting it to do unexpected things. Developing a TSR that could handle all of the special cases that they are likely to have leveraged to get the results they wanted, and also work with the sometimes fully-custom DOS extenders in use would be an ambitious undertaking, to say the least.
Is such a thing possible? Maybe. Would it always work? Very unlikely. Would it be perfect? Definitely not. Given the challenges in developing such a thing, the price of a GUS really starts to look less insane. If you think you're such a great coder that you'll be the one to do it, feel free to take a stab at it, just don't blame us if you have less hair at the end of your attempt than when you started. 🤣
wrote:let's be honest about this: the UltraSound was the first mass-market "wavetable" sound card that delivered decent sound and didn't cost a fortune.
Err... no. The Roland LAPC-I came out three years earlier. Also, the GUS had no wavetable ROM until the PnP model. So while the GUS was technically a wavetable sound card, it required the games to upload samples to the card. Because of this, it's more of a multi-channel hardware mixer. Something the Amiga could already do in 1985. The GUS probably existed because of the Amiga.
wrote:Err... no. The Roland LAPC-I came out three years earlier.
Which is not a wavetable synth. The LAPC-I uses the 'Linear Arithmetic' method of synthesis.
wrote:Also, the GUS had no wavetable ROM until the PnP model.
You say that like it is a disadvantage. The GUS was actually unique in that it had a RAM, where other wavetable synths were 'ROMplers'. The reason being that samples required a lot of memory, and ROM was just a lot cheaper, and simpler (no refresh required).
This allowed you to use it for tracker music with custom instruments, which generally sounded much better than the 'preset' sounds. So it was an advantage, and was what made the GUS unique at the time.
wrote:Because of this, it's more of a multi-channel hardware mixer. Something the Amiga could already do in 1985.
Yes and no.
The Amiga had basically an 'analog' mixer. Which worked, because there were only 4 channels, in a stereo configuration, So only two signals to combine for each speaker.
That would not be feasible for a larger number of channels, such as the 32 channels the GUS can do.
Which is why the GUS performs mixing in the digital domain.
wrote:The GUS probably existed because of the Amiga.
That is possible. It could also be coincidence.
wrote:Err... no. The Roland LAPC-I came out three years earlier. Also, the GUS had no wavetable ROM until the PnP model. So while the GUS was technically a wavetable sound card, it required the games to upload samples to the card. Because of this, it's more of a multi-channel hardware mixer. Something the Amiga could already do in 1985. The GUS probably existed because of the Amiga.
In addition to what Scali said, you quoted the key text yourself, "and didn't cost a fortune". For the price of anything with the Roland name on it, you could easily buy more than one UltraSound card.
It would be roughly two years before cards that were architecturally similar were available, in the form of the EMU8000 cards, Audiotrix Pro and others. The GUS still cost significantly less than either of those, and still had better software support. Furthermore, if having on-board ROM meant having samples of the quality of the AWE32's default ROM, I would rather have none; that had to be one of the worst ROM-based instrument banks I have ever heard in a card costing as much as it did.
I will also disagree with:
wrote:Because of this, it's more of a multi-channel hardware mixer.
Mixers are simpler than the GF-1; they don't generally support bi-directional looping and application of multiple envelopes, among other features, in hardware.
I recall having read that GUS was able to play up to 14 audio samples at the same time (or up to 32 at a reduced frequency rate). Not sure how true that fact was, though, it's possible that actual software implementation could decide how many samples a game can really play at a time. In most DOS games that use Sound Blaster Pro/16, I can only hear one audio sample at a time, though I'm yet to rule out the possibility that Sound Blaster might be able to play more samples at a time if implemented properly.
