[rescue] WTB: Gravis Ultrasound

[Francois Dion]

On Apr 4, 2005 4:32 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Mon, 04 Apr 2005 @ 12:58 -0500, Mike Parson said:
> > The Gravis Ultrasound I've got is a wavetable card (midi), not a full
> > sound card.  It would work in conjunction with the SB16, which did not
> > have wavetable support onboard, you needed an AWE32 to get both on one
> > card, which I also have.
> The Gravis Ultrasound is a full sound card.
> 
> If you have a Gravis card that is wavetable only, then you don't have
> the Ultrasound.

Actually, Gravis made the Ultrasound ACE in 95 that was wavetable
only. This is different from the original  GUS in that it doesn't have
anything to fake the soundblaster part (just IO - there actually no
OPL on the GUS except the Extreme) so you could use it with a real
SBPro or SB16.

The optional 16 bit daughterboard for the original GUS added a CS4231 codec.

A GUS MAX is an original GUS + daughterboard in one card.

What's funny is that altough the ACE is a wavetable only, since it's a
ram wavetable, nothing prevents you from playing digital audio with
the appropriate software. It just wont emulate a SB.

The original GUS goes back to 1992.

The GF1 was actually a Gravis and Forte design (Forte was/is in
upstate NY I think), based on some evolution of the DOC die from
Ensoniq. And of course everybody knows the DOC and SID tie.

At one point, in my office area at Videoway in Montreal was the person
who wrote the Adlib (even the one for the Gold I think) drivers for
Windows, the person (different) who wrote the GUS drivers for Windows
and a software engineer for Lyre (I've posted about this SGI deskside
sized additive synthesizer before). I did some testing for Gravis
itself. And sometimes we'd have lunch with some guys from Mediatrix
(another sound card manufacturer). Yeah, it was a small group of
people back then and it almost represented the whole marketplace
beside Creative. Game compatibility is what won that war of course.

Francois

Francois