Bs0Dd wrote on Yesterday, 02:54:

I have a Primax SoundStorm M16C (a.k.a. AltraSound) sound card, which is built on the Gravis GF1 chip (along with the GF1A1 chip […]
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I have a Primax SoundStorm M16C (a.k.a. AltraSound) sound card, which is built on the Gravis GF1 chip (along with the GF1A1 chip and ICS2101 mixer, typical for GUS Classic).
Therefore, I suppose the card is 100% (or at least 99%) compatible with the GUS Classic, even though it is a clone.

Photo

I have GUS drivers 4.11 + updated Mega-Em 3.11 + updated ULTRINIT 2.31.
I also installed a Pro Patches Lite 1.61 set and noticed problems with at least two games: Rise of the Triad: Dark War and Duke Nukem 3D.
These problems do not occur if I use the original Gravis patches.

Duke 3D plays SFX only in the right channel if PPL 1.61 is selected
PPL set: https://voca.ro/11nOqGRLwhXR
Original set: https://voca.ro/1hvLMdoNNngt

It seems that in the stable version of DOSBox 0.74-3 stereo SFX does not work (at least on two different computers, when running the Duke or Descent stereo test, I always hear sounds in both channels, but music seems to be stereo).
So I can't check if such a problem exists at least in emulation. But there is an old issue for DOSBox-X with the same problem when using PPL 1.61: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/issues/1029
So it seems to me that this is not an emulation problem, since the problem shows itself in the hardware as well (at least for me).

RotT refuses to start, citing a lack of GUS RAM (1024k installed) for the GUSWAVE and redirecting to the sound setup.
If I initialize SFX and then Music, I have both. But otherwise, it shows the same error. And I think there is no way to reverse the init order in the game itself.
The problem is present in DOSBox.

Screens

Do these issues exist on the original non-PnP GUS cards? And has anyone found a solution to the problems?
I only know two solutions for now:

1. Switching between sets before running these games (for myself, I wrote a small batch file for quickly replacing folders with patches). The problem does not appear, but the ability to listen to higher-quality music is lost.

2. Using SB16 as SFX card 😀

Photo

Although for this, an external mixer is probably desirable. Also... I don't know how comparable the two cards are in terms of digital sound quality...

Maybe someone knows other solutions?

See this about using third party patch files (like Propatches Lite) in games .

Re: Blood 1997 & Gravis Ultrasound

darry wrote on Yesterday, 03:02:

Re: Blood 1997 & Gravis Ultrasound

Well. It looks like everything is as I suspected. So I'll have to use one of the solutions I came up with...
It's a pity that GF1 is quite limited in terms of maximum RAM. For some reason, the card's music seems to me to be of higher quality than AWE32.
If only it had OPL3 for backward compatibility. SBOS and Mega-Em emulate it very poorly (only the presence of MT/GM support in games saves it, then you get good WT sound without native support), so you have to keep two cards in your computer.

Bs0Dd wrote on Yesterday, 15:39:

Well. It looks like everything is as I suspected. So I'll have to use one of the solutions I came up with... It's a pity that GF […]
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darry wrote on Yesterday, 03:02:

Re: Blood 1997 & Gravis Ultrasound

Well. It looks like everything is as I suspected. So I'll have to use one of the solutions I came up with...
It's a pity that GF1 is quite limited in terms of maximum RAM. For some reason, the card's music seems to me to be of higher quality than AWE32.
If only it had OPL3 for backward compatibility. SBOS and Mega-Em emulate it very poorly (only the presence of MT/GM support in games saves it, then you get good WT sound without native support), so you have to keep two cards in your computer.

A simple solution to the RAM limit is to use the original patches from Gravis in the games that run out of RAM with Pro Patches Lite. IMHO, the stock GUS patchset sounds rather nice in most scenarios.

I never really bothered much with alternate patchsets on the original GUS. Newer cards with more sample RAM capacity were more suited to such experiments. To me, the GUS experience is mostly about enjoying its MIDI playback with stock patches and taking advantage of its hardware mixing support for Amiga-style tracker music (and also demoscene productions and few games that used it directly).

That being said, the GUS' SB and FM emulation is best avoided. Most people I knew who had a GUS back in the day used it with at least one other card too (myself included).

Bs0Dd wrote on Yesterday, 15:39:

It's a pity that GF1 is quite limited in terms of maximum RAM.

From what I have gathered that is one problem overcome in the AMD InterWave variants (I have a GUS PnP clone card I would be willing to part with once it gets replaced with the MK1869 Xtreme I ordered). Software configuration, particularly supporting Epic games, is not as "out of the box" but if you can learn to get around that it offers a superior feature set to GF1.

One more thing of note: GUS, regardless of variant, is not the best digital sound choice for any Apogee Sound System game because of a bug with the mixing code (https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/1532).

Bs0Dd wrote on Yesterday, 15:39:

For some reason, the card's music seems to me to be of higher quality than AWE32.

Agreed: like all soundtracks it depends somewhat on the composition, but the posted 1-to-1 comparisons I have listened to have Gravis sounding better than even AWE64 much of the time. Not a huge wonder, seeing as its wavetable was powered by a variant of the same Ensoniq OTTO chipset that was standard for much of the later SoundScape line.