Skatoony wrote:

The thing I love the most about these? The hardware interpolation on the samples. To me, it's unmatchable by any other sound card.

The EMU8000's interpolation betters that of the GF1...

...I refuse to test them as the EMU8000 does not support sustained loops nor 8-bit samples (8-bit samples get converted to 16-bit in Impulse Tracker, thus causing the RAM usage to double in size).

And yet, many MODs sound better when played-back on an AWE32/64...

PS. Don't go on about the AWE32 and AWE64 please...

Oops! 😁

Cloudschatze wrote:

Oops! 😁

There's always one, and it had to be you! 😁

No freakin way, Cloudfriend. Original 4 channel MODs sound best on Amiga, where they were intended for and created with. Other more advanced formats such as STM and the like always sounded best on GUS as it did proper hardware splitting of the channels in question - even with it's downsampling limitations as streams increased past X (forget what X was but my statement stands regardless). ANY SB card doing MOD does not do MULTICHANNEL PROPER but rather is software interpolated BY THE PLAYER (and thus the host CPU) from whatever multichannel format into 2Channel STEREO via byte and bit-wide spitting across whichever target sample range is made available by the SB in question (ie 8, 11, 22, 44.1khz). PLEASE do not even bother with lame arguments based on personal taste as SB cards really are just stereo playback when comes to sampling for DOS playback of MOD style formats. Even the more advanced players that can make use of the EMU8K(x) tend to show it's limitations as a Soundfont playing module (which is exactly what it is - limits of buffers and so on) with it's heritage in synth sampling a la PROTEUS.

Oh and thanks Skatoony for preserving the wonderful sound and character of the GF1 in action. 😀

Skatoony wrote:

Cloudschatze wrote:

Oops! 😁

There's always one, and it had to be you! 😁

I know. I'm sorry! 🤣

I very-much appreciate the recordings you've made (and the time it took), regardless.

dh4rm4 wrote:

No freakin way.

Have you actually tried EMU8000 playback with Impulse Tracker?

Pick an Amiga-created MOD, make your recording, and I'll make mine. You are hereby challenged to a duel. 😀

haha! Sorry dude I don't have a GUS of any kind handy these days. The last Interwave card I had was like 8 years ago and my original GUS Max is in storage a long way from where I live. I'd love to take the challenge but alas no Amiga here either (had to rid myself of lots of old hardware in general when my wonderful woman and I moved to a nice new place) so I'll have to either lose by default or wait for someone with the hardware to take up the challenge in lieu...

Not only did I use Impy with a 8k I composed multiple mods using at times (these too are lost to the past sadly) and while 4 channel mods did sound 'nice' and 'crisp' on an AWE32 (with 16MB on board) they didn't sound like an Amiga. Basically the sound stage, while brighter just sounded smaller. This I personally attribute to the SB's higher sample range and forceful treatment of interpolation to 16bit no matter what. As technicians know (and producers too for that matter - look to Dangermouse and Celo's "Transformer") not ALL sampled sounds sound best at the highest interpolated rate. Moby's Insanity Arte sound track is a good example of this too, sounding much better on Amiga within the demo than played back via EMU 8K.

Alas, an epic battle over before ever begun... 😢

I appreciate your points.

Bear in mind that my own GF1/EMU8000 comparisons are limited to what I've heard/tested. So, while I've found that many of the "vanilla," 4-channel MODs sound better to my ears via 8k playback ('nice' and 'crisp,' as you note), there are just as many examples where I favor the GUS output (anything with "pseudo-effects," for example, which don't translate well to the 8k).

Cloudschatze wrote:

I very-much appreciate the recordings you've made (and the time it took), regardless.

You're welcome 😉 😁

So, an almost five-year revival, and I haven't been around here for years either.

I've actually done more GUS recordings, but this time they're all in FLAC.

These are all from Fast Tracker 2 this time:

Cedyn - Alien Sun
Cirdan - Starscreamer
Cube - Generation-X
Cube - Iconia Rageai
CyberZip - Burning My Heart
DRAX - Industrial
Dubmood & Zabutom - sa har kan man ocksa gora
Dubmood & Zabutom - Songs from the Cell
Elwood - Dead Lock
Falcon - Blue Phoebe Love
Jogeir Liljedahl & Scorpik - Ambrozia
Lizardking - Art of Chrome
MyVoice & Reptile - Alertia
MyVoice - Nosmo King
MyVoice - Stars of Eternity

They're all stored here: http://la32.co.uk/dreams/tracker/ft2/

You can really hear the sampling rate dropping on a bunch of these...

Yep still have my GUS MAX somewhere and it did sound alot better than my SB AWE32 on games and apps that had direct support for it. MOST GAMES AND APPS DID NOT SUPPORT GUS. Its SB emulation was the crappiest I ever heard, even worse the than Pro Audio Spectrum 16 that I owned.

If all you are going to do is play MODS and run DEMOS on your PC the best sound card is GUS.

Get something else if you want to play games, SB being the best choice since practically everything supported it.

Well, I just would like to add some thoughts to consider:

- GUS was introduced at SB Pro time, so much earlier than the AWE32. So AWE32 should be better...
- GUS does linear interpolation, AWE32 does 3 point interpolation. This adds the problem that samples has to be adjusted the size of a multiple of 3. In reality of course it depends if you really hear a quality gain from linear interpolation to 3 point interpolation. I think this was discussed at queststudios already and it was difficult to hear the difference. Usually other factors of the setup have a much larger influence, like 8 bit samples as input.
- AWE32 has a different frequency output than GUS, so the question would be if certain tracker music is specifically optimized for GUS frequency output. You might tune an AWE with an equalizer to have the same characteristics and vice versa of course.
- Cubic Player f.e. supports AWE MOD playback native, so it's not software mixing in this case.
- If you have enough RAM on the AWE the quality with hardware playback (max. 30 channels) should be better. A technical comparison to GUS PnP would be more fitting here.
- Often AWE and SB is mixed, while GUS is in comparison just the AWE part... (There is no codec on a GUS classic that is able to play samples directly from system RAM via DMA)

@Norton Commander: Gravis released patches for GUS support for nearly every game of that time. There is a list available with several hundred games that got GUS support. Of course some own activity is required to patch the specific game. Overall I guess there are more games that can be patches to support GUS than native AWE32 games.
GUS was usually paired with a SB, so the problems about SB emulation on GUS is kind of a 'modern age problem'. The cards design is not suitable for SB emulation, so it more a hack than a solution. Nowadays real SB compatible cards are even easier to aquire...

GUS is also a better choice for those games that supported multiple simultaneous sample playback - Doom, Descent, Duke 3D etc. They have to be mixed in software with, eg a SB16 (which is the GUS contemporary, not the AWE).