strange... I assume these worked before and now stopped? maybe some driver files got corrupted?

I installed drivers again. Problem persists. Very weird. I'm not to worried, but i would like to have it working. I remember being able to select Gravis Ultrasound on Warcraft 2 for instance, and now i can't, either Digital or MIDI music.

Do you have the Ultrasound DOS variable set as "ULTRASND=260,7,7,7,7"?

Most games that I've encountered (Warcraft included) want the full variable, whereas some, like Star Control 2, only seem to work when the variable specifies just a single IRQ.

Cloudschatze wrote:

Do you have the Ultrasound DOS variable set as "ULTRASND=260,7,7,7,7"?

Most games that I've encountered (Warcraft included) want the full variable, whereas some, like Star Control 2, only seem to work when the variable specifies just a single IRQ.

Yeah this is one of the first things i checked. I should say that i initialize my sound cards via single batch files instead via AUTOEXEC.BAT, but this shouldn't make a difference since i had this working before.

Somewhat good news:

i tried another CF Card i have here from my Super Socket 7 machine. Configurations are almost the same so everything works with my current system.

So i initialize the GUS just fine, tried Warcraft 2 to see if it detects the Gravis...and it detects it just fine.

So hardware problems are ruled out. So i tried copying settings, drivers and install games again for my current system card and problems remain. I still can't get the damn thing to work. How does it work on one CF card but not in the other? I even tried copying config.sys and autoexec.bat to my curent card and the problem persists.

I have no idea what am i missing.

IIRC GUS have troubles with HMI-based games (hiccups and no native midi support, SB emulation only). But AIL ones?

I'm still investigating, and got it working by increasing the environment size to 1024 bytes. This is still a bit non sensical to me since my environment space isn't so big but it seems that Miles and AIL games have troubles finding the variables in big environment spaces. I also noticed that the more to the end of the environment space the GUS variables are the more likely these games will have problems. If i placed the variables to the top of AUTOEXEC.BAT instead of using my batch file it started working.

So to make it work by using batch files i tried to increase the environment space from 512 bytes to 1024. And now it works everytime.

Although i was able to still make this work, i'll appreciate any advice, or any knowledge about this.

By default, DOS has a small amount of environment space for settings, switches and variables - only 256 bytes. As you add more of these, it gets used up until it's gone; when that happens, no more batch variables can be processed and you only get this on-screen message:

Out of environment space

I found this out back in 1997 when I got my first Voodoo 1 card and tried to add 3dfx environment variables in autoexec.bat; none would work, and I had no idea why until I forced autoexec.bat to pause at the end - and saw this error message. I grabbed my DOS 6.2 manual and found the section about environment variables and how to increase its space to allow more to be added. The manual also said that a long PATH statement can also use up environment space.

Here is a link to a Google Books entry from "Using MS-DOS 6.22" that has a similar explanation:

https://books.google.com/books?id=u7oN-5y7nGs … 20space&f=false

What probably happened to the PC that has your GUS Classic is that you added/modified a batch setting, switch or variable that used up your current environment space and therefore no more batch variables could be processed; this means that your Ultrasound DOS variable was not really present, and some games require it to find your GUS sound card. When you moved your batch file call for the GUS to the top of autoexec.bat it was processed and added since there was environment space available - and the games that couldn't find the GUS suddenly found it again. Increasing environment space with the SHELL command in config.sys is one of the ways to correct this, but you have to be mindful of how much to add - an equal amount of conventional memory gets reduced with each increase you make.