I've figured it out. It's all completely PnP! ViperMAX uses it's own version of ultrinit and you just set your BLASTER and ULTRASND values and run the utility again. It also has MPU= for the MPU port and there's separate value next to it which I am unsure of.

In Windows 9x you simply install it as a non-pnp device and after reboot manually configure the values to the same values as BLASTER.

I have not tried Windows XP, but since it's an ESS1688 I think you may be able to install the generic ESS1688 drivers and really get to have it all. You can even setup a game like ROTT or Duke3d and use the SB for SFX and your GUS for music and have it all mixed on one card. It even has good SnR just like the GUS by itself.

All in all, an excellent solution to have it all instead of coexisting with a noisey SB!

Another update... If you select ESS 1688 AudioDrive and manually install it in WIndows XP and manually configure your resources the card will work just fine.

I also forgot to add the ESS chip does work properly under true dos. Basically the CD installs the ultrasnd drivers with a special ultrinit.exe for setting up the ess and gf1 chips based on your SET BLASTER and ULTRASND vars. It also adds ESSCFG and ESSVOL to the ultrasnd dir. The windows driver is basically the ESS1688 driver and I'm assuming it's rebadged INI but I haven't investigated that yet.

Congrats on getting it working.

So does this version of GUS use any kind of emulation like MegaEM, SBOS etc? I presume it doesn't because of the ESS1688 chipset... What about Ultramid - does that work as expected?

UltraMID works. I haven't tried SBOS or MegaEM. Personally, I never really used either of those utilities because of MegaEMs strict requirements on being able to work at all.

I can try out SBOS for you. I guess all that would need to be done is changing over SET BLASTER=A220 ... to SET BLASTER=A240. Though, it might output music from both chipsets. I found out by accident you can keep a real sound blaster open, have it initialized, then change your set blaster, then run SBOS and if you have a mixer you could hear both cards putting out tunes. Was kind of cool having this weird fake stereo effect.

SBOS doesn't work at least with some quick tinkering. I will try and fool aorund with MegaEm later but it looks like it might be a bit of fun with some batch files changing the BLASTER commands and IRQs around and running the ultrinit again.

I'll test it out in a day or two and let you know.

MegaEm can work if you run mesetup.exe, select advanced mode and change your MPU port to 300. I cannot get the SB emulation side of MegaEm to work because it appears the ESS chip won't allow itself to work at any address other than 220. It also apparently permanently always steals DMA 1 even though it inits okay.

So is the ESS chip locked at port 220, DMA 1? What about its IRQ - can you change that?

Maybe different ESS DOS utils could change them, IIRC, there are various ESSCFG files flying around that work with ESS1688 chipsets...

It probably won't work because the ultrinit utility was specially made for the vipermax and it also sets the ess chip via the SET BLASTER=. Regular Ultrinit's won't initialize just the GF1 chip.

You mentioned earlier that there was an ESSCFG file, what does that do?

This will change the PnP values of the ESS chip. The biggest obstalce is the ultrinit will allow values of like 210-250 for SET BLASTER baseport but only 220 will initialize. And since you can't use the original ultrinit to just set the baseport for the GF1 chip on the Vipermax you'll never be able to set the GF1 at 220 which megaem will complain about. You could possibly get away with 240 baseport on Ultrasnd and Megaem OK, but no guarantees and megaem will complain with a warning every time.

For it to possibly work you'd have to do this (untested!)
1) SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D3 T4
SET ULTRASND=240,1,1,11,5
2) Run ultrinit.exe
3) Run ESSCFG.exe make sure these settings for SET BLASTER are all setup through the ESS utility
4) SET BLASTER=A240 I5 D1 T4
5) Run MegaEm

Not sure if this will even work though. The ESS chip with the SB card has good quality so I fail to really see the point of using MegaEm or SBOS. MegaEm might be cool for the few games that only support the Roland SC/GM/MT-32 family of cards for music, and in that case you can totally use MegaEm without SB for this purpose (I tested that personally).

And honestly, I use my card mainly for playing demos, mods and shareware FPS titles and anything apogee, epic, id, etc. was doing at the time which all of their games supported the Ultrasnd in some fashion.

If someone is more adept at coding and has a ViperMax... I recently acquired the Utopia Sound Division source code, aka the GUS source code. Available at http://dk.toastednet.org/GUS. I secretly included it in there a while ago hoping someone would be surprised and noticed it, but I figure now is a time to mention it.

It includes the ultrinit for the vipermax, but fails to compile because of some missing libraries from an older Gravis SDK that is missing but those libraries may have just been superfluous and could potentially compile without them. Essentially, if someone could fix it up you could address just the GF1 chip somehow, ignoring the ESS chip init and using ESSCFG to force the baseport over to 240 if it will allow it.

Slightly OT, but because of the source code I discovered a newer version of MAXSBOS for the CODEC chip that is the last revision before the switch to the AMD chip and added some new features. However, I found MAXSBOS to be subpar and went back to an SB+GUS MAX combo. And for the record, the Vipermax is not a MAX+ESS, it is a GUS Classic+ESS. There is no Crystal CODEC chip and therefore no mixer support from the gravis utilities and this means the very select few demos that even took advantage of a GUS MAX (48khz) will not detect it either because of the lack of the Crystal CODEC.

More OT, I don't believe there was any games that actually took advantage of the CODEC chip with a GUS MAX adding 48khz. Though, anything is possible.

For clarification, my query regarding SBOS was not whether there's any point in using it over the ESS, but rather what works and doesn't work with this card.

Oh sorry, I didn't mean to come across as a jerk. But yes, SBOS == No (and ViperMax made an effort to NOT include it); MegaEm = Kind of (included with ViperMax drivers).

I also haven't found any issues with any demos thus far so I'd say it's close to 100% compatibility with any ultrasound supported software (probably 100% but you can never be sure!)