appiah4 wrote on 2026-05-13, 14:19:

I will need to have it shipped to a UK address, arriving no later than say August 20 - do you think that calendar would work? If yes, I will pay up and get one of these big bois. I was incredibly sad to miss out on the first bunch..

it is quite the large window and PT->GB is pretty fast last time I checked 😀

keropi wrote on 2026-05-13, 17:19:

appiah4 wrote on 2026-05-13, 14:19:

I will need to have it shipped to a UK address, arriving no later than say August 20 - do you think that calendar would work? If yes, I will pay up and get one of these big bois. I was incredibly sad to miss out on the first bunch..

it is quite the large window and PT->GB is pretty fast last time I checked 😀

OK, I'm taking that as a yes. Let me get my name on the list in the next few days then 😀

Hello everybody,

I just discovered this forum/platform 😀

I've just recently decided to build a retro PC and I did not make a decision yet about the sound card. I am late to the party, but I would really like to buy and Orpheus II. Unfortunately the pre-order has been closed.

30 years ago I was delighted that I saved up money to buy me a Gravis Ultrasound PnP. Would love to hear this unique sound again, so if anybody is deciding to opt-out of the pre-order, please write me and I would love to take your seat at the table.

Ken79b wrote on 2026-07-05, 19:07:

Hello everybody, […]
Show full quote

Hello everybody,

I just discovered this forum/platform 😀

I've just recently decided to build a retro PC and I did not make a decision yet about the sound card. I am late to the party, but I would really like to buy and Orpheus II. Unfortunately the pre-order has been closed.

30 years ago I was delighted that I saved up money to buy me a Gravis Ultrasound PnP. Would love to hear this unique sound again, so if anybody is deciding to opt-out of the pre-order, please write me and I would love to take your seat at the table.

You can use the contact form on the site for this, there are a few spots left because of manufacturing quotas, is you can it make 8 cards it needs to be a round 10 and so on

I am wondering if anyone managed to get Sound effects in Hired Guns to run with the Orpheus II (as well as Roland MT 32 Music).

I made a separate thread about it about a year ago with no replies. But I got a bit of additional info now.

"Hired Guns" is one of those games which just lets you select Soundblaster/Roland/Adlib in its sound setting and nothing else. No IRQ or anything.
When the game is then started you will get nothing. No Music, no Sound. Just an error on Startup "Sound Environment Variable not set".
This can be "fixed" by either defining the sound vaiable in the HG.BAT or in the Autoexec.bat like
sound=C:\sound
and then that directory must contain a file ct-voice.drv

Now you got the game with music. However once you start the actual game (where you move around your characters) you hear a "CRCK" noise and all sound (music+effects) are gone.
My normal driver I use for the Orpheus is orphinit. But I tried this with unisound as well, same thing. Just that I noticed that the volume seems to be changed by the game (its stilent fitst, after the "CRCK" and then going into the menu its louder.

Now I was almost thinking that maybe this is just normal and the game doesnt have any sound. Also the game in a compilation (not mentioning or linking due to piracy rules) has no working sound effects.
There is even an article by the CRPG addict saying

..I have become jaded to claims that the Amiga version is better, but having watched some YouTube videos, I would say that here it is warranted.[...]but more importantly, there are some excellent ambient sound effects (the humming of machines, dripping water, peals of thunder) that give the game a lot of atmosphere.

But now a fellow collector also got the game in a box and I asked him to check out the sound. And for him...it just worked. He is using a PnP SB32 with an IRQ of 5:
https://youtu.be/HsgzG4G7VAk

I tried with my Orpheus/SB16 and also switched to IRQ 5 (instead of 7) but no change. It just doesnt work. Funny enough I also tried Roland MT-32 with my CM-32L via the Orpheus, and that is not working either.
So if anyone got sound effects running on this game on an Orpheus II, or gets Roland MT-32 Running on this game with an Orpheus II, it would be great if you could share how you managed to do that.

Brief Update: The SB Sound issue is still present. But found a solution for not having MT-32 Music on the Orpheus. This has been fixed by setting IRQ9 in the BIOS to ISA Legacy instead of PNP PCI/ISA

And another brief update:
I got it working on my SB16. But only if both CTSB16.SYS and CTMMSYS.SYS were loaded. Is there any equivalent for the Orpheus? I used Unisound for the SB16 as well, so I tested to just use the Orpheus and to load these 2 files in the config sys. But on the Orpheus it doesnt work.

I do not think there are equivalents for CTSB16.SYS and CTMMSYS.SYS for the crystal chip, these are ancient leftovers from the early soundblasters
crystal chips also do not support the SB-ADPCM compression/decompression modes so if any game uses these it will not work correctly

keropi wrote on 2026-07-10, 20:21:

I do not think there are equivalents for CTSB16.SYS and CTMMSYS.SYS for the crystal chip, these are ancient leftovers from the early soundblasters
crystal chips also do not support the SB-ADPCM compression/decompression modes so if any game uses these it will not work correctly

Oh, that's a shame, but good to know. This is the first game I stumbled over which requires it.

Someone could probably re-encode the sound files into a format that is compatible with the Crystal chip like what was done for Duke Nukem 2.

I'm not sure how you would extract the sound data though.