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Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#22Earlier 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.
That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#23” 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.
As far as I can tell the person you are replying to has never posted anything of value or substance, maybe they should start using AI more
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#24During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison is Sound Blaster's MIDI and the "PC squeaker") lasted only a few months because the card fried a capacitor or something like that, and that was it. That was decades ago and I still think about it not unlike a friend I left behind that I can no longer reach back to, to be perfectly honest. I had the dead-weight on my shelf, that's the last I remember. I was young and probably didn't even think of handing it to an electronics shop for a relatively cheap repair -- a fried capacitor or loose PCB connection is not a fried custom processor, I imagine.
Anyway, good memories, even in the tragedy. I can relate to people who resurrect GUS.
Since others mention similar failings of their card, I remember I too had it installed horisontally in a (Chinese/Taiwanese) mini-tower, it definitely wasn't a desktop chassis, much less an IBM PC. I guess gravity strained it to a breaking point.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#25During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison…
I was a Gravis Ultrasound Max owner just for Second Reality. That was Art.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#26For those that weren't around (or didn't do programming back in those days).
The GUS soundcard just filled a niche perfectly at point in time with a reasonable pricepoint.
It came out at the same time as the Sound Blaster 16, but while the SB16 required "expensive" software mixing for anything but prerecorded audio the GUS handled that in hardware meaning that users either traded for CPU performance or audio quality in games.
In the 486 era it was really a differentiator and also caught on in the demoscene, by the time Pentium processors rolled in the software mixing cost became far less pronounced.
Finally when Windows became the go-to for games (and CPU's got even faster, esp when MMX processors came into play) the API's made cheap hardware equally good since most developers just targetted the plain streaming API's (with software mixing) for broader compatibility.
The final holdout for GUS cards afaik was the demoscene, since the card had a built in mixer with frequency control it could play modules (.MOD, .XM,etc) with simple players that just uploaded the samples to ram and then just changed registers realtime (kinda like an Amiga but more powerful) instead of including a mixer, in the end however it was more about code-size than cpu performance, doing a 64kb intro you could shave off something like 3-10kb's compared to supporting a SoundBlaster card (depending on other tools) and those extra KB's was well suited for effects/art.
In the end though, people realized that the dosextender+GUS combo was as heavy in terms of code as just a mixer on Windows (since you didn't need a dosextender) and when better compressors arrived for Windows even the demoscene moved on.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#27this card was just the most gigantic pain in the butt.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#28Cool, I saw this one pop up on tindie a few months ago, sold out instantly... https://www.tindie.com/products/kdehl/gravis-ultrasound-gus-...
Huh I had no idea these were in demand.. I still have an original GUS card in a box somewhere. I forget the exact model but it was one of the better ones.
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#29During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison…
I was a Gravis Ultrasound Max owner just for Second Reality. That was Art.
Yeah, it infused my software engineering career and interest in optimisation and 3-D rendering.
P.S. When we invent the time machine, we should go back to load up on actual GUS _and_ spread the word for people to never install it horisontally :-)
Re: Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica
#30For those that weren't around (or didn't do programming back in those days). The GUS soundcard just filled a niche perfectly at point in time with a reasonable pricepoint. It came out at the same time as the Sound Blaster 16, but while the SB16 required "expensive" software mixing for anything but prerecorded audio the GUS handled that in hardware meaning that users either traded for CPU performance or audio quality…
Hey! I'm pretty sure I stayed at your apartment around 2003 with shock and ript when we were travelling around Europe going to demo parties!