Finally!

Awesome news! Congrats for releasing this unique card!

For those wondering about the price, this is an excellent deal compared to custom standalone GUS cards, as this also has excellent Sound Blaster Pro support and genuine Yamaha OPL. It's also significantly cheaper than most used Ultrasounds on the market.

Good news today!

About the Orpheus 2 LT, the order link gives a 404 error, you might want to fix it.

Xanxi wrote on 2023-02-05, 20:51:

Good news today!

About the Orpheus 2 LT, the order link gives a 404 error, you might want to fix it.

LT is not yet available, this was a limited black series run. When the time comes a new page will replace this.

My order is in too! Time to get my pc demos transferred to the DOS pc!

keropi wrote on 2023-02-05, 17:24:

https://i.imgur.com/3jDZ34u.jpg […]
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It is now possible to order an OrpheusII board, I have made a WIP page for it in the usual place: http://pcmidi.eu/orpheus2.html

Page has all basic info in it but not all drivers are uploaded yet - missing are mainly the stock GUS PnP ones so it's not something that can't be found easily... in the next days all will be added gradually.
If someone has some sort of "driver pack" for the GUS PnP and thinks it would be useful to add just say so.
Thanks!!!

@Xanxi:
atm LT board's design is finalized, maybe there is room to make it shorter but the main issue are the full-size wt board supports. Not sure if there is place to move them on the LT board

if you're going to make it long anyway, why not make it long enough to engage the front card support brackets in a case? i.e. a true full size ISA card

don't repeat creative's mistake re: the awe32

Was there no way to move the SIMM slot further to the right of the card to shorten it? Two large through-holes could also be added at the end, to give the option of 3D printing and extension to make it a full-length ISA card, for those who want it.

I imagine that a lot of extra space was added to make it easier to hand solder. I'm particularly curious about the location of the SIMM slot though. There seems to be a lot of dead space to accommodate it.

Longer card = more expensive pcb + more shipping risks and cost , a few extra cm do make a difference in both

The card is long enough so it can accommodate both full-size wt boards and a 72pin ram stick.

I would love to have it shorter but then we would probably have a discussion why XR385 does not fit 😀

Another option, although it's probably not a simple change would be to use a laptop SODIMM in place of the 72-pin memory. In this case though I imagine the power/compatibility complexity would require enough new chips on the board that it would be the same size anyways. 🤣

I believe I saw a Ben Heck episode on YouTube where he modded some kind of SODIMM module to work with an 8-bit CPU. I agree though, that it's probably not worth the complexity or trouble.

I think a large card is nice because most of the best sound cards were big. But I do have one computer where GUS classic just barely fits so there is a good reason for smaller size if possible. I think Orpheus II should have had 16 MB RAM on board and no SIMM socket at all. And it should have been red because GUS needs to be red etc... but none of those matter. I'm sure it is an excellent card and I really want one (several actually but just one cost enough and then were would I put all the existing cards I have?).

Ram chips could be mounted into the back of the board as well. I don't know what kind of routing this would require though.

A GUS classic is too long to fit into my case of choice. The one I originally had, I used metal shears to actually trim the PCB a few cm, and then it fit. I'll have to use a different case entirely for this custom model, since it is longer.

Awesome news!

Glad we can order and support it now.

V

About ram on board , we thought about that , but we would have to buy dram individually or buy simms and desolder, making the card more complex and more expensive. There was a risk also to get bad ram, and debugging it and fixing would be daunting. So we decided to use a simm socket for 72 pins that are better to get and cheap.

Because you guys don't have the original driver source code, I guess there is no way to easily test soldered memory.

Creative has a tool in their driver kit to test the DRAM. Is there nothing like that for GUS?

GUS drivers do have an option to test DRAM - it's not super accurate but it will reveal severe issues
thing is if a ram stick fails the test you just replace it and go on with your life , easy and cheap

keropi wrote on 2023-02-06, 14:42:

GUS drivers do have an option to test DRAM - it's not super accurate but it will reveal severe issues
thing is if a ram stick fails the test you just replace it and go on with your life , easy and cheap

The part about it not being particularly accurate can't be emphasised enough. Basically, if it finds a problem, you know that module won't be usable with the InterWave; if the test passes without error, there may still be a problem. If you're experiencing playback problems (assuming a playback mode that uses local InterWave DRAM), it could still be the memory module, even though the test didn't report any errors.

Congratulations keropi. So much respect..

I am not alone in this , without marmes and 640k!enough orpheus things would not be what they are