pouët.net

Indeed, the Ultrasound Classic and Max used memory chips commonly found on 286 and early 386 motherboards, as well as upgradable ISA VGA cards. In fact that was the way that I upgraded my own GUS Classic, with chips from a Trident 8900C VGA. In '93-'94, these Trident cards were ridiculusly common here in Greece (and painfully slow, too) so it was very easy to upgrade. Badsector, if you do own such memory chips, you can sell them their weight in gold :-P

I have a GUS PnP with 2MB of RAM, and I love the little (well... atleast compared to the MAX :) ) bugger. If you use MAXMode, you'll get 100% GUS MAX compatibility (as far as I can tell. ultrinit recognices it as GUS MAX).

I think I read in the OpenCP docs that it played everything at 101% pitch (probably the same problem as Shifter mentioned), but I can't say I've even noticed it when watching demos.

I've probably had all gusses there was, I really do prefer gus pnp.

(only minus is that innuendo by halcyon doesn't work on it, and that's the only thing I've found not working.. that also might be a problem with too high irq or something)

Old GUSes used the memchips found on ISA VGA cards and motherboards yes.
In normal IC packages.

My GUS MAX uses surface-mount memchips.
You can find those on some newer PCI VGA cards.
I upgraded 2 of my GUS MAX cards to 1 mb by taking 2 chips off an old Diamond S3 Trio64 card.

fractalgp: perhaps you never noticed it because it only gets very obvious with long sample loops.

MAXmode and loading Ultrinit usually got rid of some minor glitches and helped a bit with the tempo bug compensation, but not much. Try 'Stuff' from Xtacy on a PnP for a pretty good example how wrong it can get. I usually circumvented this glitch in FT2 by chopping up beats with offset commands ;)

I'd still go for a Classic. Use some modern-ish PCI card for Windows, and a GUS under dos and you're quite set.

My GUS Classic has always worked fine for me, even in Windows 98 (with some sucky directx drivers though).

I have an Altra Sound. On the card itself stands big "Ultra Sound" and lower "compatible". It is from Gravis, has 512 K and with 2 NEC uPD42S4260LE (user's manual, 256K*16 bit, 40 pin) it can handle 1 MB. Drivers are for Win3, the Win4 aka Win9X drivers of other GUS don't function at W98 very well. A DMX xFire 1024 solves this problem. => Sound under Windows, DOS, Linux. No Problem. Only 2nd Reality hangs on a part nearly at the end, what not happend with my SB16.

I would go for Gus PnP. Interwave has much better hw mixing capabilities than classic Gus [sound is somehow better - 44 kHz on all channels you know]. Plus, there are fine drivers for wndoze. I noticed a slight difference in long drumloops too but hardly ever in real _demo_ cuz noone used such long loops. And... classic Gus is too long... physically I mean :]]]

Are you working for Hugi now?

Just read the first few posts:
Back when I had a GUS I upgraded it from 512k to 1M using memory chips from an old S3 Trio32 or 64 card. Those had the same memory layout and latency. You might have to do some googling if the chips don't match 100%

anyone in finland happen to have a 512kb chip for me for my gusmax?

the gusmax i sent you was extended right?

If anyone is still looking for GUSes, there's also a new PnP clone which is working really well (I have only used it for MS-DOS demos, though):
https://www.tindie.com/products/kdehl/simple-gravis-ultrasound-gus-pnp-replica/

happy to hear it's working well, I've been considering getting one of these as well. I've also just got hold of a picogus (cheers dozer + polpo!) though I haven't tested it myself yet.

On the SB side, I picked up a quite cheap SB Vibra 16 CT4180 which also appears to work quite well, and is a fraction of the price of a standard SB16.

Can attest to quality of picogus. Dozer tested it with demos and addressed issues in firmware if something wasn't right.