I bought one of these when they first came out. However, I was really disappointed with how much trouble it was getting it to work with games that didn't have native support, which was most games. I think it was a mistake to release the card without a YM3812 compatible chip on board. That's where Creative Labs made the right choice in their SoundBlaster to maintain backward compatibility.
totally spot on . lack of 20$ FM chip stopped the GUS from being the defecto standard for early 90s pc's . its a lesson repeated through computer history , you have to have that base level compatibility . you can't go your own way
That's funny because, as an SB Pro (and then later, SB16) owner, I kept seeing GUS support in stuff and wishing I had the hardware to make it work. I guess that's just a touch of "the grass is greener" combined with a focus on music vs games.
I remember reading similar reports in magazines at the time, it made me not consider one. In fact I only once had a non Creative card, it was a Spea Media FX, on the box it promised all sorts of compatibility, but it didn't work properly with many games. I sold it, got a Sound Blaster 16 and Roland Sound Canvas wavetable board and life was good again :)
+The 8-Bit Guy They didn't include FM Synth because they didn't want the GUS to be just another "Soundblaster Compatible" card. I'm sure you remember all the dozens of cards like the Pro Audio Spectrum that really had little to differentiate them, and were just treated like SB Pros. Gravis made a gamble, thinking devs would be eager for a soundcard that was price-competitive with the SB, but had vastly better sound. But the gamble didn't pay off. :-(
I bought 2 GUS cards because I wanted to get away from the Yamaha FM. I love the 8-bit Keys music and 80's keyboard nostalgia, but I was never happy with Yamaha FM in the 90's in my game soundtracks. In fact I was downright mad.
This brought back so many memories! The test sounds, listening to MOD files, buying RAM upgrade chips from London Drugs, getting upgrade disks in the mail (i live close to Burnaby BC) , the sales guy at Future Shop telling me they don't sell medical equipment when we asked for an Ultrasound, heck my friend even mentioned "32 digital sound channels" in my high school yearbook (yeah we were nerds). I still have it all.
GUS sounded like crystal, and still does. Like classic synths or musical instrument, these boards ages very well and still are an enjoyment to the ears. There are dozen of epic tunes (mostly coming from the demoscene or Amiga games ports) that were even more epic with this almighty hardware. But they were, and still are, a pain in the ass to setup.
Gus has built in linear interpolation in the resampler as well as 16 bit mixing so it eliminates a lot of digital aliasing. also the audio recording had very little (basically none) base noise ( at least in gus max ) if you compare it to awe32 and even later models such as live!
Yeah - for like my first 2 years with a PC it was my only sound card. Loved the MIDI sound I could get out of it in games, but emulation of FM synth was terrible and even emulation of Soundblaster-compatible DAC was pretty bad sometimes... I kind of like that I went in a bit of an unconventional direction with my first soundcard purchase, but of course that choice did have some drawbacks for sure. Later on I supplemented with a cheap SB-compatible card and then moved on to some Turtle Beach cards for MIDI. It kind of shocks me sometimes to see people regarding the GUS with such wonder and awe. To me it's a very real thing, I experienced the good and the bad of it... And while it'd be fun to own one again, mostly I just moved on...
@@tetsujin_144 I remember Turtle Beach was a thing in the 90’s. Then in 2008 I saw that they did headphones, which I happened to be needing. I though that they were good back in the day, how bad could they be now? Just a few months later they were falling apart. Not the quality the name used to mean.
This is gonna be epic, I can't get enough of your videos on classic sound cards and old-school PC audio stuff! Thanks for another deep dive into some beloved tech, Clint!
Funny you mention DOOM. Carmack and Romero hated this thing because it made playing it feel like you were running in molasses. VERY few products performed worse with Doom than this beast.
@@RichHeimlich IIRC early versions of Doom (and it's engine) did support GUS hardware mixing, but later versions ditched it primarily due to a DMA hang bug (Doom DMA'd sound effects on the GUS) that, while not unbearable for modern enthusiasts, was a big enough deal that software mixing was used instead. Undoubtedly Carmack and Romero noticed it when testing hardware configurations for Doom 2, and found GUS tanked performance compared to other sound cards.
@@blackblob500 I think that's fairly accurate. However, I'm not sure that those early builds really ever saw the light of day, or were around for such a short time frame that no one really got to experience that working.
Maybe. There was a couple month gap between 1.2 (the release with working SFX hardware mixing) and 1.4 (1.3 wasn't really released but also had WIP GUS software mixing), and the comment from Paul Radek regarding GUS SFX mixing was comparing 1.2 to 1.666, (versions 1.4 and 1.5 were apparently only released on the internet for testing, and just as shareware releases) which was the version the first copies of Doom 2 used (1.666 was also released as a registered and shareware Doom patch in September 94).
Make a video on the card you got sent from russia . Innovation SSI-2001 . Its a very very rare card, only handfull are still functional and the guy engineered and made it from pictures of the card by himself since he did not find any schematics.
Ahhh yes, another one of those magical items. During the setup of many'a'DOS games, I always sat and wondered about the Gravis UltraSound devices and what mysteries they hold. Between that and Hercules graphics cards, the world of computing always had me wondering what else was out there. Thanks to LGR, I can see firsthand what all these things were and satisfy my vintage curiosity.
GUS actually parallels Hercules in a way. Hercules could emulate CGA in monochrome. CGA colors were so hideously bad and resolutions so low, that it actually made games look better. Likewise, the GUS could emulate lifeless FM and even the random instruments would sometimes sound better.
You should see the 8-bit guy's video on CGA. It explains well about why CGA sometimes looked really bad. That being said, if you did not know about composite, it was often hoirrible-looking. CGA composite looks decent, better than the Apple II
Dammit I lost my ultrasound ace card years ago while moving. Ah the first moment when you try to play canyon.mid and suddenly hear quality instruments.
Now I know why the GUS is such a great card! I was Sound Blaster all the way, but was always intrigued by this sound card when I saw it supported in other games.
i am wondering if someone can help me i have looked everywhere for drivers for this im not trying to spam but i am having a driver crisis! i have an unknown asus computer p4s8l motherboard and that is all i know the sound/audio and ethernet dont work just installed windows xp on it cant find drivers for anything on it anywhere! has a stock built in asus ethernet and stock HD audio/video but cant get drivers for audio protocols! its a silver asus desktop from sometime around 2008 has a 2.5ghz cpue and almost 1 gigabyte ddr of ram. PLEASE HELP
I have waited a long time for this video :) l was not dissapointed, I love that you recorded your emotions when discovering the higher sound quality. I feel that's what sepperates you from other youtubers. Showing your true personality and feelings, not playing a role, that gives me feelings, in addition to the overall high quality video. And my gravis tutorial videos did not become useless as I feared :p
I don't usually leave comments on videos but "holy crap" was right about Jazz Jackrabbit. I could hear the difference immediately before you even said anything and had the thought "This is what I've been missing all my life." That sound ridiculously awesome :D
Oh man, I've been itching for this video :D I got a GUS PnP many, many years ago, and to this day I cannot relate to the hype. It's a jack of all trades type of card, but other cards can do FM better, SB better, GM better and MT-32 of course. I found it to be a resource hog, taking a ton of interrupts, though there are workarounds. In general I found the installation process and getting it to work quite involving. The tracker support in demos and Epic games are the real highlights, though I believe the Sound Blaster driver is simply using a lower sample rate in Epic games, I wonder if someone could hack the driver to address this and support a Sound Blaster 16 for example. Thanks for this honest take on the GUS!
The PnP was a bastardized version of a real GUS card and anyone who was into DOS gaming and the demo scene knew to avoid it like the plague and get a real card.
Thing is that Wavetable cards other than the GUS were really expensive back in the day. Also the GUS allowed you to use ANY samples, and not only a fixed set of ROM samples. Wavetable cards with RAM would follow only a couple of years later. Also since the demoscene was using multi track MOD files (or s3m, ft2 etc) and was supporting the GUS extremely well, it had an uncanny coolness factor. Owning a GUS was so cool, and the red PCB added only to that...
I had an original GUS, for a week or two and though some games like Prince of Persia sounded awesome, I returned it and got an SB Pro 2.0 because I really wanted the text to speech stuff that came with it and SBOS was buggy. I wish I had kept it though.
Dude, I love your channel. I didn't get my first PC until like 1998 but I was aware of their existence for great many years and of at least some fo the things you could do with them, so I continued to dream of them throughout a huge chunk of my childhood, longingly gazing upon all the print ads I'd see. It seemed like such a magical, mystical thing, and because of my constant exposure to them, I grew to love the aesthetic of those early to mid and even late 90's print ads, their choice of typeface, photos and pictures, and continue to get a kick out of them to this day. Your channel is probably the closest I've come to recapturing some of that magic. Like that ad at 18:50, I recognized that render of a freaky guy holding a shotgun instantly.
Best episode of LGR in a while (as well as the Gizmondo one). I love how you not only take a look at the hardware itself, but also include the history behind it, the package, the setup, demos, and other tidbits. Your channel is what got me into PC gaming back in 2010, and unlike other youtubers, you've only gotten better with time. Keep doing what you do Clint.
Oh man! The GUS. I longed for this card in my younger years. I ended up with the Sound Blaster AWE32 though. EDO RAM chips et al. I was big in to the module tracking scene back then. These cards where the SHIT back then. What a great flashback this is. FastTracker / ImpulseTracker flashbacks all over. #shivers
@Nova Fawks, i did make music myself. I used Implse Tracker as shown in this video. Nothing noteworthy though. ;) Nowadays i like to play around with SunVox: www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
devttyUSB0 Woah, awesome! I'm surprised I've never heard of that program, considering how big on trackers and DAW's I am. Thanks for telling me about it! I make a lot of music myself too, mainly with LSDJ for my chiptunes and FL Studio for other EDM. Been doing it for awhile, music is a lot of fun to create. But I find trackers to be the most fun. Do you have any examples of your work?
Clint: I've missed your tender, yet informative unboxings'! A lot of this stuff is way before my time, but it's incredibly interesting! The PCB's crimson blush is invigorating indeed! I've always liked the mellow, yet bold hues of blue in my box, but I really like the way that sexy red pops! It's as dramatic as the sound differences with/without! I'm still warming up to LED rainbow madness. It's almost overwhelming: "Back in my day we had blue, white, and red. And, sonny, we had to drive fiiiifteeen miles to the nearest Fry's Electronic Store to boot!" I digress. Thank you kindly for the video and social media updates! Enjoy your vacation, sir!
Yes that the GUS doesn't sound great, even better than SB AWE32 from the comparisons I've heard, but a SB16 seems like a more fair comparison since Pro 2 only has 8-bit stereo at 22Khz.
@@jamesgarlick4573 yeah you're completely right about that. It's because even on OEM computers all the motherboards have built-in sound with THX sound 5.1 and Dolby Atmos. I don't think I've ever paid attention to see if stores like Best Buy still have sound cards. The sound that come with stock computer is now is so unbelievable it's kind of pointless to buy a sound card.. I know that they still make sound cards but that's for like true audio files were people who run a professional business like artists where sound is the utmost importance, and the sound card will make the sound from the computer that's already good to extremely good.
Mr. Lazular, your videos have helped me trough many identical cris...i crisiae, criseaee. Uhm. Those things. I remember growing up with a soundblaster system (I still own the speakers)and seeing you do videos on these kinds of sound products fills in this little untouched niche in my unfullfilled nostalgic memory that I can't help but write this 'I am running out of words' reply that isn't going anywhere. Cryptically I am trying to convey my gratefulness to what is that you are doing and after two years I am still in love with you and your channel.
Man, thanks again for this video. Wish we could meet up someday. So little people in this country who still enjoy checking out and playing retro pc games. Anyone from NL here? ^^
Duude! Epic Pinball!!!. It was ages the last time i played it! So many good memories of the ninteties. That single fragment you played just had the same effect on my brain like that animated movie were the Gastronomic Critic had when eated the Rattatouille!!!. I swear my childhood just came in front of my face!. Just for that man... Thank you! Really!.
Thank you Clint, the Gravis Ultra Sound Ace was my second upgrade to my first pc (486dx2/66). It was miles ahead of the sound blaster pro2 that was came with it, getting it to work with all the games was a long frustrating challenge, but worth it for the price. (I still have it along with a classic and a max)
I was always a little surprised that so few game companies embraced MOD based music, even once 486s were common and the music player didn't need too much overhead. The difference in quality between MODs and FM synth was just so huge.
Jason Blalock On top of that, mod music could be played through certain pc speakers, you should've seen my surprised face when i heard Star Control 2 music being played on my pc that didn't have a soundcard!
Man, in my late teens I used to sell Packard Bell junk in a retail outlet in the UK.... you just reminded me of one of my sales tricks... it was all about the audio !
I was 9 in 1992 and I only heard of this card later, when playing Duke 3D. I never got to use one, but the sound quality in this video really impresses me. The first I guess high-end card I ever saw was the AWE32, which I really loved. My school had just *one* machine with it in, and as a musician, I found it’s MIDI playback out of this world. I was just curious how the AWE32 compares to the GUS, if that’s even a fair comparison. I don’t know if it is, which is why I ask. Thank you.
Wow this reminds me so many good sweet memories ! I had that first Gravis Ultrasound in my first PC (leaving the Commodore stuff). I had so much fun with it. Finding on that early Internet era many midi banks for some amazing instruments emulation : It was so perfect for Karaoke songs (knows as .KAR files) and .MID as well. The lack of support/emulation for games didn't made me that sad as I wasn't an hardcore gamer. It was just fine for me to play some games like the Epic Pinball or those Commander Keen, Jazz and other little games of that era. Thank you LGR for bringing back to life this era ! \o/ PS: Sorry, english isn't my native language. French Canadian here. :P
Dude, what a good video. You should be proud to come back from break with such a home run. Thank you for this... now I need to reslisten to star control II...
Holy shit. I finally stumbled onto someone playing One Must Fall. That brings back memories. I got a demo disc with that game on it and fell in love with it. It was years before I got to play the full game. So cool to see it shown off in this video. I don't see people talking about that game much these days.
OMF2097 was an incredible game. I giggled like a school girl having a fangasm seeing that 15 second clip. I remember the struggles of getting the audio to work with it and the first time I had gotten to enjoy the soundtrack was using a GUS.
Fuzzy Face I think I had an SB card of some sort back then. My memory is pretty fuzzy on what we had, though I clearly renember it was a P1 133 mhz processor.
Great video! I wanted one of these as a kid as well. I had a SB Pro. It seems my computer childhood almost mirrors yours. I also had the Gravis Gamepad.
They were awesome, but they really only stood out because every SB before SB16 was... reeeaaally bad. Though the SB16 was released the same year, as was the PAS16 which also had excellent sound.
In 1983, when I was debating on purchasing (my first of many) GUS, the store owner said something to me that I have never forgotten. When I asked for his opinion of the GUS, he said, "I wouldn't trade it for a warp core." I will never forget that quote. By the way, he was correct. (DEMOSCENE 4 EVAR!!!)
Seeing those Sound Blasters reminded me that I have an original Creative Labs Phone Blaster full length card. I need to just find the dongle for it and then it will be complete. Keep up the good work on the videos! =)
Gravis Ultrasound was by far the best sound card of the era. If you fiddled with MegaEM you could enjoy absolutely awesome MIDI sounds from games which offered General MIDI or MT32 music options like Masters of Orion & Magic, Stunts, Stronghold, Gold Boxes, etc..etc... However, that was just icing on the cake. The sample based audio system made it absolutely fantastic (music) tracker card (e.g. Fasttracker 2) and made programming game sounds & music really easy. It was rather sad, that it did not do perfect emulation of Sound Blaster before ACE...when the concept was already outdated. Hilarious detail was that I was able to use my old 286's video card (I think it was a Trident TVGA) RAM chips on the GUS to upgrade the memory to 1 MB. :-D
I started making music with SoundTracker, but after I made the switch from my Amiga to PC the Gravis was my card (on Impulse Tracker). Even when I started adding some hardware (a TB-303 more notably) I could even integrate those with Impulse. Now I use Ableton but this is a great stroll down memory lane. Cheers Clint!
Excellent video! If I may comment, I think you overlooked a bit the Mega-Em part. That was a killer application for games that did not support native GUS. Back in the days, MT-32 provided the best music, but it was not an affordable device. It was sort-of semi-pro, and ultra expensive (also not sold in computer shops). Later there was the rise of the "MIDI daughter boards" (Sound Canvas, Korg) that provided amazing MIDI sound.. But that was absolutely not compatible with MT-32 (because the instruments were mapped differently). MegaEm, on the other side, provided a more than decent MT-32 emulation (with the possibility to change the sound samples, improving the default ones). The Mega-Em MT-32 emulated music in games such as Monkey Island was far, far superior than with the Adlib/SB. And since so many games supported natively the MT-32, at the end the GUS was usable in a lot of games with the best possible sound. (SBOS was okay-ish for the voices). Of course the drawback was that the MegaEm thinggie could appear a bit complicated for non-technical people who just wanted to plug and play.
Yeah I bought the GUS before MegaEm, and I never depended on it working, but I was quite happily surprised as it was getting better. That was quite a feat. I still remember the guy's name who made it: Jayeson Lee-Steere.
OK, I clicked so fast. I had a GUS Max back in the day with the full 1MB and I loved it. I'd been a fan of the demoscene and had a *huge* collection of MODs (also my stock-in-trade for BBSes), so there was no question about buying one. Hell, I didn't even mind the wonky compatibility. I found for most games that between all the various emulators, I could find something that sounded decent. And it was so worth it for that amazing sound when something did support it natively.
Epic Pinball and Raptor Call of the Shadows were my two biggest childhood games. When you showed the difference on Epic Pinball, I got a bit tingly. Good stuff.
Wow, what an interesting soundcard. I like its sound along with the Roland MT-32 sound module. Also, I kind of want to cover that Duke Nukem song on PC Engine since I've been hearing it multiple times in your videos. Great video as always! 👍🏽
i went thru all of this in the 90s , playing with midi , computers sound cards - constantly upgrading . i was in a band we had guitar synths , midi multi effects , foot controllers , software editing . lots of roland stuff gr50 gr1 jc120 amps .we had home studios with midi pc slaved to 1/2 inch 8 channel tape machines - then we were gaming so yeah when i found this channel today it brings back a lot of memory's . ultimately you really had to crack the manuals the term plug and pray comes to mind . my gear was always rock solid - i knew some folks who really struggled and never had anything working but man they wasted time and cursed a lot ! when i started - it was REALLY slow . i started with an ibm 8088 with no hd , just a pair of 5 .25 floppys. i remember running cake walk for dos , i had a hardware drum sequencer , i saved a 3 minute midi drum track from the seq to the pc . it just kept flashing " please wait " it took maybe 15 minutes to save it . in the mean time i assumed something went wrong so i tore it apart several times for like 3 days . finally i remember leaving to go eat lunch . i came back and it was saved and played perfectly . i upgraded to a 286 right after that ... well i built one , and it ended up with a short in the mobo... so yeah i (still regret) traded a roland memory card for an old 286 . i still have that acer 286 with a roland lapc mpu 401 compatible . i replaced the cmoss with aa battery's years ago . i was still using it for midi music in 2006 . that cakewalk 3.0 for dos is the best midi seq app ever . nothing can touch it . but yeah your channel is incredible ! great work pal . i still have a lot of roland gear , vg8 vg88 gr1 , i am recording an album right now with all of that but i dont use midi , i just play everything into the daw .awesome channel pal !!
Hearing MIDI files played with wavetable synthesis for the first time with my GUS, was pretty mind blowing. Never wanted to go back to FM synthesis again.
I worked at Gravis, mainly as the DOS game driver developer / developer support (e.g. author of AIL 3.0, LucasArts, EA, etc. drivers). As a fellow collector of vintage computer gear I recently looked at what UltraSounds were going for on ebay and was pretty shocked! That led me down a bit of a GUS nostalgia rabbit hole. I was not just an employee but a GUS fanatic even before that, so it's great to see the GUS getting some modern day love. Great video.
Ya i think the better audio clarity of the UltraSound vs the Sound Blaster was because it had a better amplifier. On a side note the Adlib/FM synth cards can sound better then they did but game developers didn't want to spend the time tuning the instruments.
Your channel is so good. I think what really sunk these cards is the fact that it couldn't emulate a SoundBlaster exactly. If it had that capability, there would have been no reason for the average consumer to pass them up.
So Crystal Codec was night and day compared to SB's codec. (your Jazz comment about how good it sounded). Pretty amazing. I remember being blown away when I installed my GUS Max. Great video, man. Thorough as always.
So I mistyped. Ultimately the difference you hear is the difference between 8 and 16 bit. The GUS was 16. The SB Pro was 8. The difference is significant unless you use better algorithms in your dithering. I've heard 8 bit playback on much earlier computer interfaces that sounded pretty clean. But in this case it's a matter of more bits providing that difference. The original GUS as Clint points out didn't feature a crystal codec.
I know this because I worked with both formats when these cards were released. For the original Unreal, the playback was 8 bit at first in the engine. Carlo Vogelsang and myself convinced Tim to make it 16 bit and the difference was phenomenal.
Wow, man, that really brought back memories. Especially when you mentioned the demo scene and mod trackers. Names like Skaven and Purple Motion. 2nd Reality & Future Crew come to mind. I tracked many mods in Fast Tracker II. I still have them all and can listen to them any time I want. Thanks LGR!
11:10 Not that the GUS doesn't sound great, even better than SB AWE32 from the comparisons I've heard, but a SB16 seems like a more fair comparison since Pro 2 only has 8-bit stereo at 22Khz.
You are definitely an example of great TH-cam content. I hope you continue making videos for many years to come. Even my girlfriend who knows nothing about tech loves your videos.
Wow, I had no idea the Ultrasound sounded so ultra. Sound Blaster sounds muffled and nasty by comparison. I hope one day the folks out there making Adlib clones and such can also reproduce hardware like this. Maybe throw an OPL2 on the board for good measure. Awesome stuff as always, Clint.
I am happy to own one. It's actualy a clone, made by primax, but it is 100 percent compatible with a one meg Gus. It's in my retro p3. I am now collecting Gus compatible games. For soundblaster compatibility i have an on board crystal soundchip, which works well in dos.
Now I understand why people liked this card so much, the sounds really did sound superior in the programs that supported it that is, the other unsupported programs just sounded weird but that's understandable because not all software is developed for the same hardware.
And it's not really the card's fault if it's not implemented in every single piece of software out there, programming audio for 6 different cards is a chore, and you want to ensure the customer has relatively the same experience, despite any hardware differences. Can a Gravis be practical in gaming today, with 9.1 speaker optical digital surround sound capable cards on the market? Absolutely not, but for a classic DOS gaming PC, it's near about perfect.
The ONLY reason it got any traction at all was because you could get one on a student's budget. The reason you could get it that cheaply was because much of the processing was software-based.
I bought one of these (the GUS Classic) in 1992. Upgraded it to 1MB and I still have it in my retro pc from 1997. Worked great with the games I played, as they all supported the GUS. I had it hooked up to my surround system, and it was also very nice to listen to music (Mods and Demos) played through it. I also got the Gravis Gamepad. :) Greetings from Norway.
I always really enjoy your videos about sound cards and MIDI and such. As someone who grew up not being much of a PC gamer, I've developed a fascination with how different a game can sound from card to card. And that is definitely thanks to your channel. As always, keep up the great work, man!
It's late and should be in bed but alert a LGR vid, So I'll say just one more vid. *sounds* good to me, how about you? This video gets the woodgrain *seal* of approval👍 Edit 2:42 Omg we had one of those Gravis PC Pro joysticks for our AST 486! that was our first ever joystick. Played xwing none stop with that thing! 2021 And I found a near mint condition PC Pro joystick thrifting yea!!!
This thing was the KING of sound cards. Totally made everything look like crap. The fact that it did hardware wavetable synthesis at that price at the time was a miracle, and the uptake by game developers was quick enough that you didn't really have to rely on SB or MT-32 emulation unless the game was old. It's impossible to understate at the time how insane it was to have a hardware wavetable card which GREATLY reduced CPU load and allowed everything that used sound - games, demos, productivity software - to run much faster. It was like the equivalent of a GPU today for sound.
Utter nonsense. Define "King". Sales? It never passed any of the top cards. Support? It's hard to name 10 games that supported it natively. Sound? Many other cards sounded better. If by King, you mean it was the cheapest card available that could play some decent samples, okay, sure, it could do that and impress the market of 100 people that were interested in that. This did virtually NOTHING to reduce CPU load and every game developer of the time will tell you exactly that. We did countless head-to-head performance tests with it and it was a resource SINK.
No, it wasn't the monarch of an actual nation, but it was the first PC sound card that wasn't an absolute pile of shit, so it just seemed pretty kingly by comparison.
Not by virtually any measure that mattered to the industry at large. Developers hated it. Consumers hated it. Retailers hated it. Publishers hated it. Wait, the Demoscene loved it. Well, why didn't you say so? The demoscene? Awesome. And if that group mattered at all, the product would have actually sold (and stayed sold instead of being returned in record numbers) and made a dent. They didn't and it didn't. I can't think of any other product in PC history that generated more fluff from so little substance. No joke.
Rich Heimlich LOL developers hated it, what? It was straightforward to code against and took relatively little CPU time to generate far better sound vs anything FM based, in an era where CPU cycles were paramount. The libraries AG supplied were so dead simple that sound could be handled by the regular dev team and didn’t have to be farmed out to a sound guy or involve using middlewear. There’s a good reason it showed up one day and within a year pretty much every game supported it; It was so dead simple to add GUS support that it cost nothing extra in terms of dev time and you gained a ton for utilizing it. So yeah, if you didn’t know better, you’d be fine with FM synthesis provided by the mainstream Creative/AdLib/MediaVision cards. For those who knew how to tweak their hardware (much more common back the ) a GUS was always a component.
These videos always remind me why LGR is my favourite TH-cam Channel: The hardcore nerdiness and interesting trivia. I will always be watching your stuff. Thanks!
Took a dive into Eurorack six months ago, plowed through a few FM synth manuals today, came across this very refreshing video, reminded me that I purchased a GUS ACE in '95. Still got it. Thoroughly impressed with it back then. Ran most if not all the games, sound files and software displayed in this video on a CompuAdd 386DX PC (RIP). I wanna tinker with the card, resurrect it somehow, possibly tough without a working ISA bus laying around. Think it would make a great low-powered and nostalgic MIDI sound module addition to my Eurorack.
You've brought me back to my childhood again, Clint. I always marveled at the the long list of sound card options when I installed games - including the GUS. I wondered "What is that? I bet it's cool!". Now I know. Thanks Clint - keep up the great work!
Clint thank you for these looks back. The 1990s were the golden era of gaming and PC stuff to me. I was a young 20 something then and was until the end of the 90s. Its still my favorite time of my life. Your looks back take me back and give me that warm feeling of being there again. Thanks man.
Ouch. Sampling =/= Wavetable synthesis. Wavetable synthesis is more or less looking up a specific wave in a set of them. Gravis, and other cards such as the Soundblasters that use "wavetable synthesis" just use PCM samples,most of the time (I dont know if any of them really used wavetables as in what PPG Wave, the mentioned Ensoniq's or other synths). I know its how they advertised it then, but i just wanted to clear it out for the others. Great video none the less!
Though this is exactly as he said commonly called wave table synthesis. The only real wave table synthesis I have been able to find in retro computing is the chip in the apple ][GS. You might also count the wave channels of the NES and GB, but those are somewhat more complicated.
awesome video!! you made me dig up all three of my GUS cards, the ultrasound, the max and the PNP. I don't have a PC with an ISA slot any longer, not sure what to do with them anymore. Maybe I'll source some parts and build a 90's 486 PC for nostalgia sake :)
Thank you for a great review, Clint! I had a classic GUS back in the day (with memory maxed out) and loved it! Some games without native GUS support were really frustrating to get to work, but there were a lot of games with support also. Now I'm just using DosBox with both SB and GUS emulation enabled, though, it's too much hassle for me to deal with old hardware.
Mr. LGR (Clint) I want you to know that I am a HUGE fan!! THANK YOU for making this video (as well as ALL of your videos)!! You REALLY bring me back to my (OUR) chbildhood! Keep it up brotha!!
14:52 - OMG! Nearly 30 years later, I've found it! The way the Xargon opening theme sounded on SBOS-emulated Ultrasound! Funny you say it sucks, but this is the way I was introduced to it, so when I heard the gravelly, scratchy way it's supposed to sound on a real OPL2 card, I thought it sounded terrible. Thank you for sharing this part!
Loved the Star Control II music. Takes me back seeing that card and the magazine text. My first sound card was a Sound Blaster 16 Basic Value. About $99 in 1994. I was so nervous installing it. Was the first time Id opened the PC I got that year. Great times. Still have that card in box right above me here. ahhh ISA.
I bought one of these when they first came out. However, I was really disappointed with how much trouble it was getting it to work with games that didn't have native support, which was most games. I think it was a mistake to release the card without a YM3812 compatible chip on board. That's where Creative Labs made the right choice in their SoundBlaster to maintain backward compatibility.
totally spot on . lack of 20$ FM chip stopped the GUS from being the defecto standard for early 90s pc's . its a lesson repeated through computer history , you have to have that base level compatibility . you can't go your own way
That's funny because, as an SB Pro (and then later, SB16) owner, I kept seeing GUS support in stuff and wishing I had the hardware to make it work.
I guess that's just a touch of "the grass is greener" combined with a focus on music vs games.
I remember reading similar reports in magazines at the time, it made me not consider one. In fact I only once had a non Creative card, it was a Spea Media FX, on the box it promised all sorts of compatibility, but it didn't work properly with many games. I sold it, got a Sound Blaster 16 and Roland Sound Canvas wavetable board and life was good again :)
+The 8-Bit Guy They didn't include FM Synth because they didn't want the GUS to be just another "Soundblaster Compatible" card. I'm sure you remember all the dozens of cards like the Pro Audio Spectrum that really had little to differentiate them, and were just treated like SB Pros. Gravis made a gamble, thinking devs would be eager for a soundcard that was price-competitive with the SB, but had vastly better sound. But the gamble didn't pay off. :-(
I bought 2 GUS cards because I wanted to get away from the Yamaha FM. I love the 8-bit Keys music and 80's keyboard nostalgia, but I was never happy with Yamaha FM in the 90's in my game soundtracks. In fact I was downright mad.
My first Windows PC, in 1991, had an ultrasound. I didn't realize how lucky I was until I went to a friend's house and he had a sound blaster.
still better than beeper, or covox :)
But... The video is about a soundcard from 1992...
@@amigabang6157 huh. Yeah, you're right. I gotta be remembering something wrong, here.
This brought back so many memories! The test sounds, listening to MOD files, buying RAM upgrade chips from London Drugs, getting upgrade disks in the mail (i live close to Burnaby BC) , the sales guy at Future Shop telling me they don't sell medical equipment when we asked for an Ultrasound, heck my friend even mentioned "32 digital sound channels" in my high school yearbook (yeah we were nerds). I still have it all.
Even more, the Ultrasound was THE soundboard of the PC Demoscene!
he mentions that @ 15:35
Yes. Also, Gravis sent their cards out to many folks in the demoscene, particularly musicians and tracker developers.
@@chuckbiscuito Correct call. Almost all of these people came from the Amiga and Atari ST.
Maktone made good use of it.
Yes, the demoscene was the single reason I bought a GUS ACE, and later a GUS MAX. Still have both cards somewhere.
GUS sounded like crystal, and still does. Like classic synths or musical instrument, these boards ages very well and still are an enjoyment to the ears. There are dozen of epic tunes (mostly coming from the demoscene or Amiga games ports) that were even more epic with this almighty hardware.
But they were, and still are, a pain in the ass to setup.
Gus has built in linear interpolation in the resampler as well as 16 bit mixing so it eliminates a lot of digital aliasing. also the audio recording had very little (basically none) base noise ( at least in gus max ) if you compare it to awe32 and even later models such as live!
Holy hell! Other people bought that card besides me? Loved the sound but hated the compatibility problems. Epic Pinball? What a flashback! Thank you!
Yeah - for like my first 2 years with a PC it was my only sound card. Loved the MIDI sound I could get out of it in games, but emulation of FM synth was terrible and even emulation of Soundblaster-compatible DAC was pretty bad sometimes...
I kind of like that I went in a bit of an unconventional direction with my first soundcard purchase, but of course that choice did have some drawbacks for sure.
Later on I supplemented with a cheap SB-compatible card and then moved on to some Turtle Beach cards for MIDI.
It kind of shocks me sometimes to see people regarding the GUS with such wonder and awe. To me it's a very real thing, I experienced the good and the bad of it... And while it'd be fun to own one again, mostly I just moved on...
@@tetsujin_144 I remember Turtle Beach was a thing in the 90’s. Then in 2008 I saw that they did headphones, which I happened to be needing. I though that they were good back in the day, how bad could they be now? Just a few months later they were falling apart. Not the quality the name used to mean.
This is gonna be epic, I can't get enough of your videos on classic sound cards and old-school PC audio stuff! Thanks for another deep dive into some beloved tech, Clint!
I remember listening to DOOM 1 shareware with a GUS in a college dorm room. Wow. Choirs and all that.
Funny you mention DOOM. Carmack and Romero hated this thing because it made playing it feel like you were running in molasses. VERY few products performed worse with Doom than this beast.
@@RichHeimlich IIRC early versions of Doom (and it's engine) did support GUS hardware mixing, but later versions ditched it primarily due to a DMA hang bug (Doom DMA'd sound effects on the GUS) that, while not unbearable for modern enthusiasts, was a big enough deal that software mixing was used instead. Undoubtedly Carmack and Romero noticed it when testing hardware configurations for Doom 2, and found GUS tanked performance compared to other sound cards.
@@blackblob500 I think that's fairly accurate. However, I'm not sure that those early builds really ever saw the light of day, or were around for such a short time frame that no one really got to experience that working.
Maybe. There was a couple month gap between 1.2 (the release with working SFX hardware mixing) and 1.4 (1.3 wasn't really released but also had WIP GUS software mixing), and the comment from Paul Radek regarding GUS SFX mixing was comparing 1.2 to 1.666, (versions 1.4 and 1.5 were apparently only released on the internet for testing, and just as shareware releases) which was the version the first copies of Doom 2 used (1.666 was also released as a registered and shareware Doom patch in September 94).
Make a video on the card you got sent from russia . Innovation SSI-2001 . Its a very very rare card, only handfull are still functional and the guy engineered and made it from pictures of the card by himself since he did not find any schematics.
In Soviet Russia, the card plays you.
I really appreciate the time and effort you put into videos like this! I feel like you're doing some really important historical work!
Ahhh yes, another one of those magical items. During the setup of many'a'DOS games, I always sat and wondered about the Gravis UltraSound devices and what mysteries they hold. Between that and Hercules graphics cards, the world of computing always had me wondering what else was out there. Thanks to LGR, I can see firsthand what all these things were and satisfy my vintage curiosity.
GUS actually parallels Hercules in a way. Hercules could emulate CGA in monochrome. CGA colors were so hideously bad and resolutions so low, that it actually made games look better. Likewise, the GUS could emulate lifeless FM and even the random instruments would sometimes sound better.
You should see the 8-bit guy's video on CGA. It explains well about why CGA sometimes looked really bad. That being said, if you did not know about composite, it was often hoirrible-looking. CGA composite looks decent, better than the Apple II
Dammit I lost my ultrasound ace card years ago while moving. Ah the first moment when you try to play canyon.mid and suddenly hear quality instruments.
I lost my GUS and SCC-1 in a move in 2012. :(
They don’t like moving, apparently.
Welcome back Clint! I'm already enjoying the video before watching it :P
Man, I didn't even really get a chance to miss him and he's already back. He's a treasure.
Now I know why the GUS is such a great card! I was Sound Blaster all the way, but was always intrigued by this sound card when I saw it supported in other games.
i am wondering if someone can help me i have looked everywhere for drivers for this im not trying to spam but i am having a driver crisis! i have an unknown asus computer p4s8l motherboard and that is all i know the sound/audio and ethernet dont work just installed windows xp on it cant find drivers for anything on it anywhere! has a stock built in asus ethernet and stock HD audio/video but cant get drivers for audio protocols! its a silver asus desktop from sometime around 2008 has a 2.5ghz cpue and almost 1 gigabyte ddr of ram. PLEASE HELP
kennys Boat, I don't think there were ever drivers developed for win xp. The hardware was already commercially obsolete by then.
"Clinthhhhhh!!!!" cit. Detective Barbie
I have waited a long time for this video :) l was not dissapointed, I love that you recorded your emotions when discovering the higher sound quality. I feel that's what sepperates you from other youtubers. Showing your true personality and feelings, not playing a role, that gives me feelings, in addition to the overall high quality video.
And my gravis tutorial videos did not become useless as I feared :p
And Yes!
It's finally here! I've been waiting for this since you got that second Gravis Ultrasound in one of your mail unboxings in 2017!
Tony Hong +1! And it was great to see it here in this video again! 😁
I don't usually leave comments on videos but "holy crap" was right about Jazz Jackrabbit. I could hear the difference immediately before you even said anything and had the thought "This is what I've been missing all my life." That sound ridiculously awesome :D
Oh man, I've been itching for this video :D I got a GUS PnP many, many years ago, and to this day I cannot relate to the hype. It's a jack of all trades type of card, but other cards can do FM better, SB better, GM better and MT-32 of course. I found it to be a resource hog, taking a ton of interrupts, though there are workarounds. In general I found the installation process and getting it to work quite involving. The tracker support in demos and Epic games are the real highlights, though I believe the Sound Blaster driver is simply using a lower sample rate in Epic games, I wonder if someone could hack the driver to address this and support a Sound Blaster 16 for example. Thanks for this honest take on the GUS!
The PnP was a bastardized version of a real GUS card and anyone who was into DOS gaming and the demo scene knew to avoid it like the plague and get a real card.
Heck yeah, this is awe64some!
It simply sounded better than the sb line of products.
Thing is that Wavetable cards other than the GUS were really expensive back in the day. Also the GUS allowed you to use ANY samples, and not only a fixed set of ROM samples. Wavetable cards with RAM would follow only a couple of years later. Also since the demoscene was using multi track MOD files (or s3m, ft2 etc) and was supporting the GUS extremely well, it had an uncanny coolness factor. Owning a GUS was so cool, and the red PCB added only to that...
I had an original GUS, for a week or two and though some games like Prince of Persia sounded awesome, I returned it and got an SB Pro 2.0 because I really wanted the text to speech stuff that came with it and SBOS was buggy. I wish I had kept it though.
Dude, I love your channel.
I didn't get my first PC until like 1998 but I was aware of their existence for great many years and of at least some fo the things you could do with them, so I continued to dream of them throughout a huge chunk of my childhood, longingly gazing upon all the print ads I'd see. It seemed like such a magical, mystical thing, and because of my constant exposure to them, I grew to love the aesthetic of those early to mid and even late 90's print ads, their choice of typeface, photos and pictures, and continue to get a kick out of them to this day.
Your channel is probably the closest I've come to recapturing some of that magic. Like that ad at 18:50, I recognized that render of a freaky guy holding a shotgun instantly.
Best episode of LGR in a while (as well as the Gizmondo one). I love how you not only take a look at the hardware itself, but also include the history behind it, the package, the setup, demos, and other tidbits.
Your channel is what got me into PC gaming back in 2010, and unlike other youtubers, you've only gotten better with time. Keep doing what you do Clint.
I had that card... i remember the buyers remorse...
Yes where near enough games had proper support.
I been waiting on this and did not disappoint at all. I still have my GUS to this day in my retro PC. and is a must-have card.
Oh man! The GUS. I longed for this card in my younger years. I ended up with the Sound Blaster AWE32 though. EDO RAM chips et al. I was big in to the module tracking scene back then. These cards where the SHIT back then. What a great flashback this is. FastTracker / ImpulseTracker flashbacks all over. #shivers
This is a weird-nerd-boner-video. Sorry. Had to share.
I'm with you there, I had the AWE32 as well (or was it the SB32? can't recall offhand), and with the RAM expansion capabilities, it was baller.
Did you ever make music yourself? (or, still do?)
@Nova Fawks, i did make music myself. I used Implse Tracker as shown in this video. Nothing noteworthy though. ;) Nowadays i like to play around with SunVox: www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
devttyUSB0 Woah, awesome! I'm surprised I've never heard of that program, considering how big on trackers and DAW's I am. Thanks for telling me about it! I make a lot of music myself too, mainly with LSDJ for my chiptunes and FL Studio for other EDM. Been doing it for awhile, music is a lot of fun to create. But I find trackers to be the most fun. Do you have any examples of your work?
Clint: I've missed your tender, yet informative unboxings'! A lot of this stuff is way before my time, but it's incredibly interesting! The PCB's crimson blush is invigorating indeed! I've always liked the mellow, yet bold hues of blue in my box, but I really like the way that sexy red pops! It's as dramatic as the sound differences with/without! I'm still warming up to LED rainbow madness. It's almost overwhelming: "Back in my day we had blue, white, and red. And, sonny, we had to drive fiiiifteeen miles to the nearest Fry's Electronic Store to boot!" I digress. Thank you kindly for the video and social media updates! Enjoy your vacation, sir!
I remember growing up back in the mid 90's when i had my first pc when sound cards were more popular than video cards.
It made it all the worse for me, because my shittty out-dated pc was in desperate need of both, always, even after upgrades, it was never enough.
Yes that the GUS doesn't sound great, even better than SB AWE32 from the comparisons I've heard, but a SB16 seems like a more fair comparison since Pro 2 only has 8-bit stereo at 22Khz.
Lol! Now sound cards are practically a waste of money on new computers!
@@jamesgarlick4573 yeah you're completely right about that. It's because even on OEM computers all the motherboards have built-in sound with THX sound 5.1 and Dolby Atmos. I don't think I've ever paid attention to see if stores like Best Buy still have sound cards. The sound that come with stock computer is now is so unbelievable it's kind of pointless to buy a sound card.. I know that they still make sound cards but that's for like true audio files were people who run a professional business like artists where sound is the utmost importance, and the sound card will make the sound from the computer that's already good to extremely good.
I remember my friend got a soundblaster awe32 and i was so impressed by it lol.
Gotta love the big "ASSEMBLED IN CANADA" on the card :)
Also the "made in Singapore" too, these days Singapore is unlikely to be able to pay workers enough to assemble computer peripherals.
Also home to ATI, now AMD. Folks from Markham, Ontario know what I mean.
and yes!
Congratulations on getting your hands on it. These look back videos are always great
Mr. Lazular, your videos have helped me trough many identical cris...i crisiae, criseaee. Uhm. Those things. I remember growing up with a soundblaster system (I still own the speakers)and seeing you do videos on these kinds of sound products fills in this little untouched niche in my unfullfilled nostalgic memory that I can't help but write this 'I am running out of words' reply that isn't going anywhere. Cryptically I am trying to convey my gratefulness to what is that you are doing and after two years I am still in love with you and your channel.
HOW DE FAK AM I NOT SUBSCRIBED? CORRECTED FOR THIS.
Sounds absolutely fantastic. Really impressive, clear audio and a red PCB too? Very yes.
Amazingly generous donations!
Man, thanks again for this video. Wish we could meet up someday. So little people in this country who still enjoy checking out and playing retro pc games. Anyone from NL here? ^^
Basically the emulation was them saying “this is a sound blaster, it sucks don’t buy it” lol
And thus missed the entire point of how to market a product.
Duude! Epic Pinball!!!. It was ages the last time i played it! So many good memories of the ninteties.
That single fragment you played just had the same effect on my brain like that animated movie were the Gastronomic Critic had when eated the Rattatouille!!!. I swear my childhood just came in front of my face!. Just for that man... Thank you! Really!.
So many capacitors, that appeals to me.
you like soldering or what?
I was going to say, until they need to be replaced.
Hey Steve
@@Jannesmitderwelle hey Jannes 👍
Which one is for flux?
Thank you Clint, the Gravis Ultra Sound Ace was my second upgrade to my first pc (486dx2/66). It was miles ahead of the sound blaster pro2 that was came with it, getting it to work with all the games was a long frustrating challenge, but worth it for the price. (I still have it along with a classic and a max)
Up for the mention of Star Control II. Best soundtracks ever.
I was always a little surprised that so few game companies embraced MOD based music, even once 486s were common and the music player didn't need too much overhead. The difference in quality between MODs and FM synth was just so huge.
SC2 was an amazing game. Then I went backwards and played Lemmngs,,,
Jason Blalock On top of that, mod music could be played through certain pc speakers, you should've seen my surprised face when i heard Star Control 2 music being played on my pc that didn't have a soundcard!
Yep. Although SC2 did take a pretty noticeable performance hit if you tried PC speaker mode on a 386.
Jason Blalock Funny thing is, i played it on a 8088 for the 1st time, yea the game ran super slow but the music, was just amazing xD
Man, in my late teens I used to sell Packard Bell junk in a retail outlet in the UK.... you just reminded me of one of my sales tricks... it was all about the audio !
19:06 - nothing has ever looked more 1996 than those box graphics
That _is_ an incredibly 1996 box, you're correct.
I was 9 in 1992 and I only heard of this card later, when playing Duke 3D. I never got to use one, but the sound quality in this video really impresses me. The first I guess high-end card I ever saw was the AWE32, which I really loved. My school had just *one* machine with it in, and as a musician, I found it’s MIDI playback out of this world. I was just curious how the AWE32 compares to the GUS, if that’s even a fair comparison. I don’t know if it is, which is why I ask. Thank you.
I freaked out when you mentioned Star Control 2. It was one of my absolute favorites.
welcome back... this video is great!!! really shows you got some much needed rest
that epic pinball's sound difference got me like GOD DAMN, stereo crisp ringing clean af
Wavetable synths were all about the percussion
Yay! I greedily, eagerly, and enthusiastically bid you welcome! Welcome back, I hope your time was productive and helpful!
Wow this reminds me so many good sweet memories ! I had that first Gravis Ultrasound in my first PC (leaving the Commodore stuff). I had so much fun with it. Finding on that early Internet era many midi banks for some amazing instruments emulation : It was so perfect for Karaoke songs (knows as .KAR files) and .MID as well. The lack of support/emulation for games didn't made me that sad as I wasn't an hardcore gamer. It was just fine for me to play some games like the Epic Pinball or those Commander Keen, Jazz and other little games of that era. Thank you LGR for bringing back to life this era ! \o/
PS: Sorry, english isn't my native language. French Canadian here. :P
Bernard Couture is good Eah!
Dude, what a good video. You should be proud to come back from break with such a home run. Thank you for this... now I need to reslisten to star control II...
Holy shit. I finally stumbled onto someone playing One Must Fall. That brings back memories. I got a demo disc with that game on it and fell in love with it. It was years before I got to play the full game. So cool to see it shown off in this video. I don't see people talking about that game much these days.
OMF2097 was an incredible game. I giggled like a school girl having a fangasm seeing that 15 second clip. I remember the struggles of getting the audio to work with it and the first time I had gotten to enjoy the soundtrack was using a GUS.
Fuzzy Face I think I had an SB card of some sort back then. My memory is pretty fuzzy on what we had, though I clearly renember it was a P1 133 mhz processor.
Great video! I wanted one of these as a kid as well. I had a SB Pro. It seems my computer childhood almost mirrors yours. I also had the Gravis Gamepad.
Fun fact, Deadmau5 were in the demo scene back in the days :)!
xDanishGamerz Deadmau5, but yeah
Haha, That's true. MY B.
I love dead mau five
Wow you put a lot of effort in this which we can see! Awesome!
Man, I'm almost tear eyed. I never got to use a GUS back in the day and now I see they were actually as awesome as we thought.
They were awesome, but they really only stood out because every SB before SB16 was... reeeaaally bad. Though the SB16 was released the same year, as was the PAS16 which also had excellent sound.
In 1983, when I was debating on purchasing (my first of many) GUS, the store owner said something to me that I have never forgotten. When I asked for his opinion of the GUS, he said, "I wouldn't trade it for a warp core." I will never forget that quote. By the way, he was correct. (DEMOSCENE 4 EVAR!!!)
5:09 "shipped to the land of John Candy"
today's generation will not know what that meant
Seeing those Sound Blasters reminded me that I have an original Creative Labs Phone Blaster full length card. I need to just find the dongle for it and then it will be complete. Keep up the good work on the videos! =)
Gravis Ultrasound was by far the best sound card of the era. If you fiddled with MegaEM you could enjoy absolutely awesome MIDI sounds from games which offered General MIDI or MT32 music options like Masters of Orion & Magic, Stunts, Stronghold, Gold Boxes, etc..etc...
However, that was just icing on the cake. The sample based audio system made it absolutely fantastic (music) tracker card (e.g. Fasttracker 2) and made programming game sounds & music really easy.
It was rather sad, that it did not do perfect emulation of Sound Blaster before ACE...when the concept was already outdated.
Hilarious detail was that I was able to use my old 286's video card (I think it was a Trident TVGA) RAM chips on the GUS to upgrade the memory to 1 MB. :-D
I started making music with SoundTracker, but after I made the switch from my Amiga to PC the Gravis was my card (on Impulse Tracker). Even when I started adding some hardware (a TB-303 more notably) I could even integrate those with Impulse. Now I use Ableton but this is a great stroll down memory lane. Cheers Clint!
Excellent video! If I may comment, I think you overlooked a bit the Mega-Em part. That was a killer application for games that did not support native GUS. Back in the days, MT-32 provided the best music, but it was not an affordable device. It was sort-of semi-pro, and ultra expensive (also not sold in computer shops). Later there was the rise of the "MIDI daughter boards" (Sound Canvas, Korg) that provided amazing MIDI sound.. But that was absolutely not compatible with MT-32 (because the instruments were mapped differently). MegaEm, on the other side, provided a more than decent MT-32 emulation (with the possibility to change the sound samples, improving the default ones). The Mega-Em MT-32 emulated music in games such as Monkey Island was far, far superior than with the Adlib/SB. And since so many games supported natively the MT-32, at the end the GUS was usable in a lot of games with the best possible sound. (SBOS was okay-ish for the voices).
Of course the drawback was that the MegaEm thinggie could appear a bit complicated for non-technical people who just wanted to plug and play.
Yeah I bought the GUS before MegaEm, and I never depended on it working, but I was quite happily surprised as it was getting better. That was quite a feat. I still remember the guy's name who made it: Jayeson Lee-Steere.
I loved my Gravis Ultrasound. And the Gravis Phoenix was THE way to play Descent. Thanks for the overview!
OK, I clicked so fast. I had a GUS Max back in the day with the full 1MB and I loved it. I'd been a fan of the demoscene and had a *huge* collection of MODs (also my stock-in-trade for BBSes), so there was no question about buying one. Hell, I didn't even mind the wonky compatibility. I found for most games that between all the various emulators, I could find something that sounded decent. And it was so worth it for that amazing sound when something did support it natively.
Exactly!
Epic Pinball and Raptor Call of the Shadows were my two biggest childhood games. When you showed the difference on Epic Pinball, I got a bit tingly. Good stuff.
Wow, what an interesting soundcard. I like its sound along with the Roland MT-32 sound module. Also, I kind of want to cover that Duke Nukem song on PC Engine since I've been hearing it multiple times in your videos. Great video as always! 👍🏽
i went thru all of this in the 90s , playing with midi , computers sound cards - constantly upgrading . i was in a band we had guitar synths , midi multi effects , foot controllers , software editing . lots of roland stuff gr50 gr1 jc120 amps .we had home studios with midi pc slaved to 1/2 inch 8 channel tape machines - then we were gaming so yeah when i found this channel today it brings back a lot of memory's . ultimately you really had to crack the manuals the term plug and pray comes to mind . my gear was always rock solid - i knew some folks who really struggled and never had anything working but man they wasted time and cursed a lot ! when i started - it was REALLY slow . i started with an ibm 8088 with no hd , just a pair of 5 .25 floppys. i remember running cake walk for dos , i had a hardware drum sequencer , i saved a 3 minute midi drum track from the seq to the pc . it just kept flashing " please wait " it took maybe 15 minutes to save it . in the mean time i assumed something went wrong so i tore it apart several times for like 3 days . finally i remember leaving to go eat lunch . i came back and it was saved and played perfectly . i upgraded to a 286 right after that ... well i built one , and it ended up with a short in the mobo... so yeah i (still regret) traded a roland memory card for an old 286 . i still have that acer 286 with a roland lapc mpu 401 compatible . i replaced the cmoss with aa battery's years ago . i was still using it for midi music in 2006 . that cakewalk 3.0 for dos is the best midi seq app ever . nothing can touch it . but yeah your channel is incredible ! great work pal . i still have a lot of roland gear , vg8 vg88 gr1 , i am recording an album right now with all of that but i dont use midi , i just play everything into the daw .awesome channel pal !!
Hearing MIDI files played with wavetable synthesis for the first time with my GUS, was pretty mind blowing. Never wanted to go back to FM synthesis again.
I worked at Gravis, mainly as the DOS game driver developer / developer support (e.g. author of AIL 3.0, LucasArts, EA, etc. drivers).
As a fellow collector of vintage computer gear I recently looked at what UltraSounds were going for on ebay and was pretty shocked! That led me down a bit of a GUS nostalgia rabbit hole. I was not just an employee but a GUS fanatic even before that, so it's great to see the GUS getting some modern day love. Great video.
1:08 Holy s**t, that's an incredible difference in sound quality!
You're reliving my youth with all the retro PC hardware stuff.
I had a 480 DX2 66 MHz as well.
It seemed back then almost every store had a software and hardware section, I remember spending hours just looking at all the upgrades and drooling.
Ya i think the better audio clarity of the UltraSound vs the Sound Blaster was because it had a better amplifier. On a side note the Adlib/FM synth cards can sound better then they did but game developers didn't want to spend the time tuning the instruments.
Your channel is so good. I think what really sunk these cards is the fact that it couldn't emulate a SoundBlaster exactly. If it had that capability, there would have been no reason for the average consumer to pass them up.
I bought one of these (Max version) in the day. And the ram upgrade too. Man it made Doom soo eerie and even better!
Your videos are always such high quality.
So Crystal Codec was night and day compared to SB's codec. (your Jazz comment about how good it sounded). Pretty amazing. I remember being blown away when I installed my GUS Max. Great video, man. Thorough as always.
Listening to your A/B, it's clear SB Pro only played back in 8 bit, with terrible dithering.
That's probably not it. Probably just top notch board design.
So I mistyped. Ultimately the difference you hear is the difference between 8 and 16 bit. The GUS was 16. The SB Pro was 8. The difference is significant unless you use better algorithms in your dithering. I've heard 8 bit playback on much earlier computer interfaces that sounded pretty clean. But in this case it's a matter of more bits providing that difference. The original GUS as Clint points out didn't feature a crystal codec.
I know this because I worked with both formats when these cards were released. For the original Unreal, the playback was 8 bit at first in the engine. Carlo Vogelsang and myself convinced Tim to make it 16 bit and the difference was phenomenal.
Ah right. Apparently i was replying to your earlier comment.
Wow, man, that really brought back memories. Especially when you mentioned the demo scene and mod trackers. Names like Skaven and Purple Motion. 2nd Reality & Future Crew come to mind. I tracked many mods in Fast Tracker II. I still have them all and can listen to them any time I want. Thanks LGR!
11:10 Not that the GUS doesn't sound great, even better than SB AWE32 from the comparisons I've heard, but a SB16 seems like a more fair comparison since Pro 2 only has 8-bit stereo at 22Khz.
The SB16 didn't start shipping until May of 1993 so the Pro 2 was Creative's direct competitor at the time.
Oh ok, I've seen 1992 mentioned elsewhere (ADG's video on sound cards I think).
Yeah I wasn't sure myself but checked Creative's website. See 'May 1993': "Shipped Sound Blaster 16": www.creative.com/corporate/milestones/?year=1991%20-%201995
You are definitely an example of great TH-cam content. I hope you continue making videos for many years to come. Even my girlfriend who knows nothing about tech loves your videos.
I used the GUS mostly for making tracker music back during the early 90's.
Wow, I had no idea the Ultrasound sounded so ultra. Sound Blaster sounds muffled and nasty by comparison. I hope one day the folks out there making Adlib clones and such can also reproduce hardware like this. Maybe throw an OPL2 on the board for good measure.
Awesome stuff as always, Clint.
I am happy to own one. It's actualy a clone, made by primax, but it is 100 percent compatible with a one meg Gus. It's in my retro p3. I am now collecting Gus compatible games. For soundblaster compatibility i have an on board crystal soundchip, which works well in dos.
I thought you were taking a break and I get a full 20min retrospective!? You spoil us Clint, you spoil us.
Now I understand why people liked this card so much, the sounds really did sound superior in the programs that supported it that is, the other unsupported programs just sounded weird but that's understandable because not all software is developed for the same hardware.
And it's not really the card's fault if it's not implemented in every single piece of software out there, programming audio for 6 different cards is a chore, and you want to ensure the customer has relatively the same experience, despite any hardware differences. Can a Gravis be practical in gaming today, with 9.1 speaker optical digital surround sound capable cards on the market? Absolutely not, but for a classic DOS gaming PC, it's near about perfect.
Midnight Mechanic yes exactly, putting in support isn't something that is instantly accomplished by simply snaping your finders.
I used to have to keep both a GUS and SB installed
I used to reconfigure my computer depending on the game or app. Of course I never closed the case, and eventually I just stopped having cases.
The ONLY reason it got any traction at all was because you could get one on a student's budget. The reason you could get it that cheaply was because much of the processing was software-based.
I bought one of these (the GUS Classic) in 1992. Upgraded it to 1MB and I still have it in my retro pc from 1997. Worked great with the games I played, as they all supported the GUS. I had it hooked up to my surround system, and it was also very nice to listen to music (Mods and Demos) played through it. I also got the Gravis Gamepad. :) Greetings from Norway.
Welcome back from your vacation!
I always really enjoy your videos about sound cards and MIDI and such. As someone who grew up not being much of a PC gamer, I've developed a fascination with how different a game can sound from card to card. And that is definitely thanks to your channel. As always, keep up the great work, man!
It's late and should be in bed but alert a LGR vid, So I'll say just one more vid. *sounds* good to me, how about you?
This video gets the woodgrain *seal* of approval👍
Edit 2:42
Omg we had one of those Gravis PC Pro joysticks for our AST 486! that was our first ever joystick. Played xwing none stop with that thing!
2021
And I found a near mint condition PC Pro joystick thrifting yea!!!
Been waiting for this since you teased it in the other episode
This thing was the KING of sound cards. Totally made everything look like crap. The fact that it did hardware wavetable synthesis at that price at the time was a miracle, and the uptake by game developers was quick enough that you didn't really have to rely on SB or MT-32 emulation unless the game was old. It's impossible to understate at the time how insane it was to have a hardware wavetable card which GREATLY reduced CPU load and allowed everything that used sound - games, demos, productivity software - to run much faster. It was like the equivalent of a GPU today for sound.
It was fun to play some of the old games with MT-32 emulation just to hear something different.
Utter nonsense. Define "King". Sales? It never passed any of the top cards. Support? It's hard to name 10 games that supported it natively. Sound? Many other cards sounded better. If by King, you mean it was the cheapest card available that could play some decent samples, okay, sure, it could do that and impress the market of 100 people that were interested in that. This did virtually NOTHING to reduce CPU load and every game developer of the time will tell you exactly that. We did countless head-to-head performance tests with it and it was a resource SINK.
No, it wasn't the monarch of an actual nation, but it was the first PC sound card that wasn't an absolute pile of shit, so it just seemed pretty kingly by comparison.
Not by virtually any measure that mattered to the industry at large. Developers hated it. Consumers hated it. Retailers hated it. Publishers hated it. Wait, the Demoscene loved it. Well, why didn't you say so? The demoscene? Awesome. And if that group mattered at all, the product would have actually sold (and stayed sold instead of being returned in record numbers) and made a dent. They didn't and it didn't. I can't think of any other product in PC history that generated more fluff from so little substance. No joke.
Rich Heimlich LOL developers hated it, what? It was straightforward to code against and took relatively little CPU time to generate far better sound vs anything FM based, in an era where CPU cycles were paramount. The libraries AG supplied were so dead simple that sound could be handled by the regular dev team and didn’t have to be farmed out to a sound guy or involve using middlewear. There’s a good reason it showed up one day and within a year pretty much every game supported it; It was so dead simple to add GUS support that it cost nothing extra in terms of dev time and you gained a ton for utilizing it.
So yeah, if you didn’t know better, you’d be fine with FM synthesis provided by the mainstream Creative/AdLib/MediaVision cards. For those who knew how to tweak their hardware (much more common back the ) a GUS was always a component.
Wow, this holiday ended fast :D Something tells me you didn`t have a proper holiday :D Good to have you back :) :)
Uploaded: 47 seconds ago.
Well then. I have no choice.
These videos always remind me why LGR is my favourite TH-cam Channel: The hardcore nerdiness and interesting trivia.
I will always be watching your stuff.
Thanks!
This was a massive jump in audio tech. For graphics we had a 3dfx voodoo, for audio there was GUS.
Took a dive into Eurorack six months ago, plowed through a few FM synth manuals today, came across this very refreshing video, reminded me that I purchased a GUS ACE in '95. Still got it. Thoroughly impressed with it back then. Ran most if not all the games, sound files and software displayed in this video on a CompuAdd 386DX PC (RIP). I wanna tinker with the card, resurrect it somehow, possibly tough without a working ISA bus laying around. Think it would make a great low-powered and nostalgic MIDI sound module addition to my Eurorack.
20:14 Holy Christ, One Must Fall was my favorite game ever when it came out.
You've brought me back to my childhood again, Clint. I always marveled at the the long list of sound card options when I installed games - including the GUS. I wondered "What is that? I bet it's cool!". Now I know. Thanks Clint - keep up the great work!
Gotta love how no-one has completely seen the video yet but everyone is still commenting just because.. why not? 🤔
A Gravis Sound card on a LRG Video. What else you need to know?
Lukas Peruzovic lol that of course
Like you..?
J'ai pas d'idée de nom indeed, like I said "why not?"
I'm a simple man, I see LGR, I give thumbs up and leave a comment.
Clint thank you for these looks back. The 1990s were the golden era of gaming and PC stuff to me. I was a young 20 something then and was until the end of the 90s. Its still my favorite time of my life. Your looks back take me back and give me that warm feeling of being there again. Thanks man.
Ouch. Sampling =/= Wavetable synthesis. Wavetable synthesis is more or less looking up a specific wave in a set of them. Gravis, and other cards such as the Soundblasters that use "wavetable synthesis" just use PCM samples,most of the time (I dont know if any of them really used wavetables as in what PPG Wave, the mentioned Ensoniq's or other synths). I know its how they advertised it then, but i just wanted to clear it out for the others. Great video none the less!
came to say the same thing.
Though this is exactly as he said commonly called wave table synthesis.
The only real wave table synthesis I have been able to find in retro computing is the chip in the apple ][GS.
You might also count the wave channels of the NES and GB, but those are somewhat more complicated.
awesome video!! you made me dig up all three of my GUS cards, the ultrasound, the max and the PNP. I don't have a PC with an ISA slot any longer, not sure what to do with them anymore.
Maybe I'll source some parts and build a 90's 486 PC for nostalgia sake :)
GUS GUS GUS GUS GUS.. FINALLY!!! Been waiting for this so much.. thanks !! :-)
Thank you for a great review, Clint! I had a classic GUS back in the day (with memory maxed out) and loved it! Some games without native GUS support were really frustrating to get to work, but there were a lot of games with support also. Now I'm just using DosBox with both SB and GUS emulation enabled, though, it's too much hassle for me to deal with old hardware.
The Gravis Analog Pro is the most phallic joystick I've ever seen.
Mr. LGR (Clint) I want you to know that I am a HUGE fan!! THANK YOU for making this video (as well as ALL of your videos)!! You REALLY bring me back to my (OUR) chbildhood! Keep it up brotha!!
4:53 Just cuz it caught my eye, how many of you recognize the term "TSR"??
14:52 - OMG! Nearly 30 years later, I've found it! The way the Xargon opening theme sounded on SBOS-emulated Ultrasound! Funny you say it sucks, but this is the way I was introduced to it, so when I heard the gravelly, scratchy way it's supposed to sound on a real OPL2 card, I thought it sounded terrible. Thank you for sharing this part!
Reminds me of the times when there was all that cool and expensive hardware I could have never afforded.
Loved the Star Control II music. Takes me back seeing that card and the magazine text. My first sound card was a Sound Blaster 16 Basic Value. About $99 in 1994. I was so nervous installing it. Was the first time Id opened the PC I got that year. Great times. Still have that card in box right above me here. ahhh ISA.