31–40 of 48 posts
Cool, 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.
Former 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.
For 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!
” 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).
His "secret" is basically sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.
https://www.amazon.com/Open-Circuits-Beauty-Electronic-Compo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
During 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.
It was fun but I think my curiosity with assembling replicas of ancient tech is satisfied. This one looks more approachable.
During 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.
Former 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.
As someone who couldn't afford it, I always felt excluded when developers have not implemented any alternative, like if someone had plain sound blaster clone.
GUS selling point was offloading sound engine to hardware mixer, but by the time UltraSound PnP released CPUs were fast enough for fully software GM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a Gravis Ultrasound Max owner just for Second Reality. That was Art.
Second Reality was art indeed, but the GUS didn't make all that much difference for it. The soundtrack didn't have higher rate samples for the GUS's memory to hold or more channels for it to mix. Later demos and games did use these capabilities, but for Second Reality, the GUS sounded just about the same as a 16-bit Sound Blaster.