LGR - Gravis UltraSound: 1992 Sound Card Retrospective
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
eightbit
I think the hype around this card is way overboard. It is a very nice card for what it can do no doubt, but you would never catch me dropping a few hundred on this. I remember when it came out as well and I had some friends who bought into the hype back then. They were all pretty much disappointed as David said that he was in the lack of game support. I recall at one point one of those friends begging me to trade my AWE32 for his GUS. no way in hell I would do it.
Today I think the only ways I would end up owning one of these things are if either I found one in the wild or were offered one for really cheap or free. Otherwise the better choice is a much more compatible Soundblaster. For me a Soundblaster CT2770 with OPL3 combined with a Roland synth for general MIDI (I have the SC-50) is really the best bang for your buck. At least there you have vast game compatibility and can enjoy general MIDI music with so many games that support it. And it will still be cheaper than a GUS.
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I think the hype around this card is way overboard. It is a very nice card for what it can do no doubt, but you would never catch me dropping a few hundred on this. I remember when it came out as well and I had some friends who bought into the hype back then. They were all pretty much disappointed as David said that he was in the lack of game support. I recall at one point one of those friends begging me to trade my AWE32 for his GUS. no way in hell I would do it.
Today I think the only ways I would end up owning one of these things are if either I found one in the wild or were offered one for really cheap or free. Otherwise the better choice is a much more compatible Soundblaster. For me a Soundblaster CT2770 with OPL3 combined with a Roland synth for general MIDI (I have the SC-50) is really the best bang for your buck. At least there you have vast game compatibility and can enjoy general MIDI music with so many games that support it. And it will still be cheaper than a GUS.
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D827
Oh how I remember those days of sometimes difficult sound compatibility with games. I had the first adlib, then migrated to soundblaster versions until the AWE32, which was a bit of a monster card and sounded pretty good from what I remember, it then lasted until getting PCI sound blaster cards before onboard sound got decent enough to not need it.
The headache was often one of drivers as back then my pc had SCSI HDDs, and the drivers could only be loaded into the first 640k, until the drivers were eventually supported being loaded into higher memory thanks to the motherboard having a support rom iirc. Using SCSI outside of UNIX or Mac was very uncommon back then especially on dos/windows. The reason was because my father worked for Sun so often had access to 1gb or 2Gb drives, which were massive compared with the standard pc offerings of the time.
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Oh how I remember those days of sometimes difficult sound compatibility with games. I had the first adlib, then migrated to soundblaster versions until the AWE32, which was a bit of a monster card and sounded pretty good from what I remember, it then lasted until getting PCI sound blaster cards before onboard sound got decent enough to not need it.
The headache was often one of drivers as back then my pc had SCSI HDDs, and the drivers could only be loaded into the first 640k, until the drivers were eventually supported being loaded into higher memory thanks to the motherboard having a support rom iirc. Using SCSI outside of UNIX or Mac was very uncommon back then especially on dos/windows. The reason was because my father worked for Sun so often had access to 1gb or 2Gb drives, which were massive compared with the standard pc offerings of the time.
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Geenimetsuri
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
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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
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Rob
The Gravis Ultrasound card was pretty much the hardware of choice in the demoscene during the nineties. Practically all demos, intros and music software that was released back then only contained support for the GUS. I believe it was the ability to offload sample mixing to the card, that made it so popular by programmers, because it saved a lot of expensive CPU time that could now be used for other calculations. And next to that, the audio quality was much better compared to Soundblaster Pro and 16.
I still have one lying around (a GUS MAX to be exact) and already refused to sell it at least a couple of times for prices above -350, -. But I'll sell it for 1 BTC; )
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The Gravis Ultrasound card was pretty much the hardware of choice in the demoscene during the nineties. Practically all demos, intros and music software that was released back then only contained support for the GUS. I believe it was the ability to offload sample mixing to the card, that made it so popular by programmers, because it saved a lot of expensive CPU time that could now be used for other calculations. And next to that, the audio quality was much better compared to Soundblaster Pro and 16.
I still have one lying around (a GUS MAX to be exact) and already refused to sell it at least a couple of times for prices above -350, -. But I'll sell it for 1 BTC; )
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Andrew
My first sound card was a loaded GUS with 1MB of RAM, bought from a friend's elder brother for $100. 00 CDN in 1994. Ran it on a 486DX2/66 for years, until I -upgraded- to an AWE64 Gold. The lack of game support didn't bother me as I mostly used it for tracking, first in UltraTracker, then FT2.
About a decade ago I went through a hardware purge, throwing away both cards, along with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI, and a pair of Voodoo1s.
Needless to say, I'm kicking myself every time I open up the auction site that shall not be named to take a look at how ridiculously expensive they've all become.
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My first sound card was a loaded GUS with 1MB of RAM, bought from a friend's elder brother for $100. 00 CDN in 1994. Ran it on a 486DX2/66 for years, until I -upgraded- to an AWE64 Gold. The lack of game support didn't bother me as I mostly used it for tracking, first in UltraTracker, then FT2.
About a decade ago I went through a hardware purge, throwing away both cards, along with a Voodoo3 2000 PCI, and a pair of Voodoo1s.
Needless to say, I'm kicking myself every time I open up the auction site that shall not be named to take a look at how ridiculously expensive they've all become.
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fanjoy
Now that people see these sell for about 2x their original price back in 1992, how many are kicking themselves for not keeping their cards? I still have my original SoundBlaster 16-bit card from 1994. It's an ISA card though so I don't have a way to test it currently, but hopefully it may be worth something some day (I mean the card + 4x CD-ROM that came with it cost $300 back in 1994--of course the CD-ROM drive died about 8 years later, but i still have the card. 26 years later and it looks to be in good physical shape so it might still work. I just need to acquire a 486 or 386 to test.
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Now that people see these sell for about 2x their original price back in 1992, how many are kicking themselves for not keeping their cards? I still have my original SoundBlaster 16-bit card from 1994. It's an ISA card though so I don't have a way to test it currently, but hopefully it may be worth something some day (I mean the card + 4x CD-ROM that came with it cost $300 back in 1994--of course the CD-ROM drive died about 8 years later, but i still have the card. 26 years later and it looks to be in good physical shape so it might still work. I just need to acquire a 486 or 386 to test.
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I'm
Creative is having problems selling their products now with integrated audio chips around. Its hard to justify spending 50 to 200 bucks when a 5 dollar onboard chip does it well enough. However im sure there is a sizable improvement. Thats why people buy standalone dacs and amps for their headphones which are miles ahead of onboard stuff, even really good onboard. Even vs dedicated soundcards. Even though theyre pretty good. Its just a matter of which is more versatile. A box of amp and dac u can easily move around or a pc add in card that u cant and the winner is clear.
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Creative is having problems selling their products now with integrated audio chips around. Its hard to justify spending 50 to 200 bucks when a 5 dollar onboard chip does it well enough. However im sure there is a sizable improvement. Thats why people buy standalone dacs and amps for their headphones which are miles ahead of onboard stuff, even really good onboard. Even vs dedicated soundcards. Even though theyre pretty good. Its just a matter of which is more versatile. A box of amp and dac u can easily move around or a pc add in card that u cant and the winner is clear.
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weust
The GUS was always mythical to me ever since the demo scene stuff on PC (knowing it on Atari ST before through family.
In 1996 when the PnP came out I convinced my dad to buy a Gravis Ultrasound, but had to decide between the Max en the PnP.
Wish I had gone with the Max instead, because demo scene stuff didn't use the PnP at all (at least not that I can remember.
Seeing here there are clones by Argus really makes me want to check that out.
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The GUS was always mythical to me ever since the demo scene stuff on PC (knowing it on Atari ST before through family.
In 1996 when the PnP came out I convinced my dad to buy a Gravis Ultrasound, but had to decide between the Max en the PnP.
Wish I had gone with the Max instead, because demo scene stuff didn't use the PnP at all (at least not that I can remember.
Seeing here there are clones by Argus really makes me want to check that out.
reply
Jeff
The early SB's were steaming piles of poo. I was a PAS16 person all the way. Never had a GUS, but based on this video I would have liked it. My all time favorite was the Aureal Vortex 2. 0 cards. I can still remember playing Unreal Tournament with headphones and hearing people walk above and below me. To be honest I've never been happy with any Sound Blaster and I owned pretty much all of them. So glad onboard audio now rocks.
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The early SB's were steaming piles of poo. I was a PAS16 person all the way. Never had a GUS, but based on this video I would have liked it. My all time favorite was the Aureal Vortex 2. 0 cards. I can still remember playing Unreal Tournament with headphones and hearing people walk above and below me. To be honest I've never been happy with any Sound Blaster and I owned pretty much all of them. So glad onboard audio now rocks.
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Quentin
silly question for you, but have you heard of an -ESS audi. odrive- soundcard? i have 4 of them (3 identical and one slightly different) and then i have an SRS 3-D sterio card with risers for MIDI line in line out and mic (as well as the usual plugs) and oddly. one for TVaudio and one for radio (all ISA slot cards)
the main chip on it is an AZtech azt2320 the card also has V1. 1 painted on it
reply
silly question for you, but have you heard of an -ESS audi. odrive- soundcard? i have 4 of them (3 identical and one slightly different) and then i have an SRS 3-D sterio card with risers for MIDI line in line out and mic (as well as the usual plugs) and oddly. one for TVaudio and one for radio (all ISA slot cards)
the main chip on it is an AZtech azt2320 the card also has V1. 1 painted on it
reply
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