The GUS was such a fantastic card. I didn't have much money as a kid, but found a very heavily discounted GUS Classic around 94 (probably because a newer model was out). I harvested RAM from an old videocard and bumped the RAM up to 1MB that way. Being able to load up your own samples and using them in your games, etc. was a lot of fun.
The card fried at some point because it was so heavy that it bent and hit the bottom of the PC's chassis.
Later I got a GUS Extreme, which had 1MB of RAM on the board already and an ESS AudioDrive chip. Though I experimented far less with this card.
For what it's worth, if you don't have the chip that powers this card, there's also the PicoGUS which is a multi-function, software-defined ISA card that includes the ability to emulate the Gravis Ultrasound among other sound cards: https://picogus.com/
I have a PicoGUS and have had a lot of fun futzing around with Claude and porting Cave Story to DOS [1] the last couple of months after SDL announced DOS support.
Originally I was just using it as a Soundblaster, but in the last few weeks added Waveblaster, Adlib, and Gravis Ultrasound support. It's been a lot of fun learning how the GUS works and hearing how distinctively different it is from other sound hardware of that era.
” Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.”
You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
Oh wow thanks, I had completely forgotten about the Ultrasound even though I loved mine back in the days.
The GUS was such a fantastic card. I didn't have much money as a kid, but found a very heavily discounted GUS Classic around 94 (probably because a newer model was out). I harvested RAM from an old videocard and bumped the RAM up to 1MB that way. Being able to load up your own samples and using them in your games, etc. was a lot of fun.
The card fried at some point because it was so heavy that it bent and hit the bottom of the PC's chassis.
Later I got a GUS Extreme, which had 1MB of RAM on the board already and an ESS AudioDrive chip. Though I experimented far less with this card.
We also had their gamepad at some point.
For what it's worth, if you don't have the chip that powers this card, there's also the PicoGUS which is a multi-function, software-defined ISA card that includes the ability to emulate the Gravis Ultrasound among other sound cards: https://picogus.com/
I have a PicoGUS and have had a lot of fun futzing around with Claude and porting Cave Story to DOS [1] the last couple of months after SDL announced DOS support.
Originally I was just using it as a Soundblaster, but in the last few weeks added Waveblaster, Adlib, and Gravis Ultrasound support. It's been a lot of fun learning how the GUS works and hearing how distinctively different it is from other sound hardware of that era.
1. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu
Cool, I saw this one pop up on tindie a few months ago, sold out instantly... https://www.tindie.com/products/kdehl/gravis-ultrasound-gus-...
” Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.”
You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
He did a live stream of some of the reverse-engineering work https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2814615896