Gravis ULTRAsound anyone. (pic)

Zardoz

Zardoz

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 27, 2000
Messages
3,251
yay, I got this for 1 dollar today, the classic Gravis ULTRAsound, going to put this in my old game box.

gravisultrasound.JPG


ps; yes thats ISA lmao it has jumpers for IRQ and stuff.
 
Kuyt said:
How does it sound?
Click to expand...

back in the day of the 386/486 this was one of the best sound cards you could get, as for today prolly very lacking.


got it more for oh shit thats a GUS! factor.
 
Sweet! Back in the day you always felt that you're missin out unless you had one of em'. it's like having on board graphics these days.
 
lol I remember this as a choice when you had to select your soundcard, it was either this or sound blaster 16, and some other things I don't remember. Man, I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my old pc D: some games just don't like XP
 
Wasn't this thing only 8-bit? I remember emulating it through my SBLive back int eh day for Duke3D. Ahh those were the days with Win95/98, duke3d, shadow warrior and all that jazz.
 
Heh, I still remember AWE32 vs. SB 16 + wavetable synthesis daughterboard vs. GUS (Max) fights on comp.sys.ibm.pc.advocacy newsgroup. GUS usually required some fancy tweaking or patching to work with most of the games and software emulators (MEGAEM and SBOS) for compatibility with SB/general midi devices. It was a very nice card though - had the max version with full 1 MB of memory and it worked well along with SB 16. It was impressive to hear to hear my first non-FM synthesized midis back then. :)
 
Very cool. It almost gives me the desire to start collecting these old cards purely for shits & giggles (almost).

What are the specs on your old box, by the way?
 
eetoi said:
lol I remember this as a choice when you had to select your soundcard, it was either this or sound blaster 16, and some other things I don't remember. Man, I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my old pc D: some games just don't like XP
Click to expand...

One of the other sound cards that was not Gravis and not Creative Labs was really popular. Was it a Roland something?

Also, when I got my first Sound Blaster (for a 486 SX33, 4MB RAM), that was quite possibly the single greatest upgrade I have ever done to a computer. Games when from "beep beep BWEEP screech" to "OMFG I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS SHIT SOUNDS SO REAL OMG!!!" Playing Tie Fighter on that system was so fun... Thats probably the last time I made an upgrade that completely blew me away :D

Also tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files was fun as hell. I miss that... Damn I feel so old now.
 
phide said:
Very cool. It almost gives me the desire to start collecting these old cards purely for shits & giggles (almost).

What are the specs on your old box, by the way?
Click to expand...

My Classic box is the shit :D
I love this box for what it is...

Gigabyte GA-7IXE Motherboard
1 GHz Althon Thunderbird Slot A (yes the Thunderbird model)
Alpha P7125 heatsink and fans
512 MB ram PC100 SDRAM
PowerMan 300W PSU
3DFX VooDoo 5 5500 AGP
Areal Vortex Superquad PCI
Gravis ULTRAsound (GUS) ISA -NEW-
AMD PCI NIC 10/100
WD hard drive 80GB I think
Plextor DVD drive and a Plextor cdr drive
Epson dual floppy drive (OMG) :D

pics
DSC00044.JPG


DSC00045.JPG


DSC00046.JPG


DSC00047.JPG


DSC00049.JPG
 
I think Roland SCC-1 was the high end board for PC midi playback then and they also had SCD-10/SCD-15 add-on card fitting the wavetable daughterboard connector on some of the cards, like SB16. Yamaha had a nice XG wavetable card too, don't remember the model it was though.
 
ocellaris said:
Games when from "beep beep BWEEP screech" to "OMFG I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS SHIT SOUNDS SO REAL OMG!!!"
Click to expand...
That was my experience with Doom and my first Sound Blaster (the original 1.0). It was about as impressive a leap as going from S3 ViRGE-powered software-rendered Quake to Voodoo-powered, bilinear-filtered GLQuake (holy shit!). Upgrades have been hum-drum ever since.
 
mlaine said:
I think Roland SCC-1 was the high end board for PC midi playback then and they also had SCD-10/SCD-15 add-on card fitting the wavetable daughterboard connector on some of the cards, like SB16. Yamaha had a nice XG wavetable card too, don't remember the model it was though.
Click to expand...

hell yeah dood, I been trying to get one, some guy on ebay had one but I missed it. yeah I want a SCC-1 bad, that was a cool card for midi...
 
I've been staring longingly at my Ultrasound MAX in the parts drawer. I'm thinking of building a tiny no-case system around it, and a socket A athlon xp-m mobo with an ISA slot. That would be very retro.

How does it sound? The Crystal 4321 seems like a quite nice DAC. 16 bit, low thd+n, hardware PCM.
 
ocellaris said:
One of the other sound cards that was not Gravis and not Creative Labs was really popular. Was it a Roland something?
Click to expand...

Yes, Roland was another big name back then. They did music though, not sound. The major players in the PC sound market were thus:

Adlib: Made one of the very first PC sound cards. Actually it was nothing more than a Yamaha OPL2 chip for your PC. Gave you simple 2-operator FM capability that could be used for music and sort of for sound effects. It's FM sound was the standard music many PC gamers heard for many years. They made a later card but it didn't do well and they disappeared.

Creative: They made the SoundBlaster and successors like the SB Pro and SB16. Still around, making cards today (the X-Fi series). The SoundBlaster was pretty much the PC soundcard. Everything else on the market was "SoundBlaster compatible." Basically the original SB took an OPL2 chip and added an 8-bit mono DAC. This meant you could have FM music and digital sound. Very, very popular. Later models had better FM, stereo DACs and so on.

Advanced Gravis: They made the Gravis Ultrasound the original poster here got. This thing wasn't as popular as the SB cards because it cost more, but was damn amazing. It did actual hardware mixing of digital sound. You could play multiple digital samples at once off of the card. This not only let you have more sound effects with less load on the computer, but it let the card play back digital formats like Amiga MOD files in hardware, and also to do wavetable MIDI synthesis.

Roland: They made, and still make, high end MIDI music hardware. The products relevant to the PC are the MT-32 and the SoundCanvas. The MT-32 was a subtractive, programmable sound synthesizer that gave far superior sound to FM. It was an external module that cost a ton, but if you had one, you got the best sound of the day. A lot of games were composed on one, and then translated for FM sound. Later they released the SoundCanvas line, with the iconic product being the SC-55. This was a high quality wavetable synthesizer that was the first to be General MIDI compatible. It quickly became the gold standard, and most later games had GM or specific SoundCanvas GS soundtrack modes. Roland still makes sound modules, and in fact made the SoundCanvas (SD-20 and SD-80) until rather recently.


There were other card makers, but almost all of them made cards designed to be compatible with one of the various SoundBlaster cards.
 
Just for fun, I setup DOSbox to emulate the GUS. Now I want a real one!

But first I need to find an SFF Pentium 2-3 box with PCI and ISA slots.
 
Heh makes me miss my classic box that I recently got rid of about 2 years ago. It was nice, but I just didn't need it with VM and DOSbox anymore. Wasn't anything I really intended to build, I just love a lot of classic games and put it together with old parts I had laying around that were pretty much too worthless to sell. It was a Pentium 3 550MHz, 256MB of ram, a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP and I had both an Aureal and a Creative Soundblaster for it. It was all hooked to an old Viewsonic 21" CRT if I remember right.


I do miss it a bit, though it became kind of pointless. While it ran mid 90's to early 2000s games great, it was useless for much of anything newer or older than that. DOSbox and VMs could do the whole range. When I had it, it was a nice way to revisit the games I played as a kid though :)


On a side note I think the Aureal is one of the cards Sycraft forgot in his post. IIRC they were pretty popular for a bit. I think Creative sued them over something and while Aureal won the case, Creative ran them out of money in the process. If I remember right anyway.
 
LOL, I still have my AWE64 Gold laying around, waiting for me to make a Windows 98/Dos box so i can use it again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top