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Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
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Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#12Former FastTracker II [1] user reporting in.
The Gravis Ultrasound had an incredible price to performance ratio back in the day and made high quality wavetable synthesis at "CD quality" available to the masses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2
Edit: The fact that quite a few games supported the GUS out of the box or received patches to do so was also a well received boon on my side.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#13” Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.” You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
Eric is a very well-known reverse engineering hobbyist. He's RE'd several boards over the past several years, all are on his github. He also has built several novel designs from scratch (Such as the Graphics Gremlin - a FPGA-based MDA/CGA card that outputs to a VGA monitor).
Cool.
Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.
If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.
Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#14> If you want to build this board, first make sure you have an AMD InterWave chip, the AM78C201. The design of the card is quite simple since essentially all sound card functionality is built into the AMD chip. ...it's a breakout board for an OOP chip that's impossible to find?
It was used on other sound cards as well, you don't have to get one from a broken gus.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#15Man, throwing away a GUS Classic 20 years ago alongside a bunch of other obsolete PC hardware was something I still regret to this day.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#16I think the main problem will be sourcing one of the AMD InterWave chips. Those are (to my knowledge) not produced anymore and the only source would be another GUS card
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#17For what it's worth, if you don't have the chip that powers this card, there's also the PicoGUS which is a multi-function, software-defined ISA card that includes the ability to emulate the Gravis Ultrasound among other sound cards: https://picogus.com/
Seems like the chip is available here: https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/762821.html?srsltid=AfmBOoraT...
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#18” Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.” You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
For me, one of the saddest side-effects of modern generative AI is this apparent rise in an attitude of “I don’t know how to do this, therefore anyone who does this must have just one-shotted it with AI”.
Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eric is a very well-known reverse engineering hobbyist. He's RE'd several boards over the past several years, all are on his github. He also has built several novel designs from scratch (Such as the Graphics Gremlin - a FPGA-based MDA/CGA card that outputs to a VGA monitor).
Cool. Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip. If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed. Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.
This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.
At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#20For reference, this card has been cloned at least 3 times now by hobbyists, but all the prior ones refused to release the source.