During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison is Sound Blaster's MIDI and the "PC squeaker") lasted only a few months because the card fried a capacitor or something like that, and that was it. That was decades ago and I still think about it not unlike a friend I left behind that I can no longer reach back to, to be perfectly honest. I had the dead-weight on my shelf, that's the last I remember. I was young and probably didn't even think of handing it to an electronics shop for a relatively cheap repair -- a fried capacitor or loose PCB connection is not a fried custom processor, I imagine.

Anyway, good memories, even in the tragedy. I can relate to people who resurrect GUS.

Since others mention similar failings of their card, I remember I too had it installed horisontally in a (Chinese/Taiwanese) mini-tower, it definitely wasn't a desktop chassis, much less an IBM PC. I guess gravity strained it to a breaking 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/

Former FastTracker II [1] user reporting in.

The Gravis Ultrasound had an incredible price to performance ratio back in the day and made high quality wavetable synthesis at "CD quality" available to the masses.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2

Edit: The fact that quite a few games supported the GUS out of the box or received patches to do so was also a well received boon on my side.

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 those that weren't around (or didn't do programming back in those days).

The GUS soundcard just filled a niche perfectly at point in time with a reasonable pricepoint.

It came out at the same time as the Sound Blaster 16, but while the SB16 required "expensive" software mixing for anything but prerecorded audio the GUS handled that in hardware meaning that users either traded for CPU performance or audio quality in games.

In the 486 era it was really a differentiator and also caught on in the demoscene, by the time Pentium processors rolled in the software mixing cost became far less pronounced.

Finally when Windows became the go-to for games (and CPU's got even faster, esp when MMX processors came into play) the API's made cheap hardware equally good since most developers just targetted the plain streaming API's (with software mixing) for broader compatibility.

The final holdout for GUS cards afaik was the demoscene, since the card had a built in mixer with frequency control it could play modules (.MOD, .XM,etc) with simple players that just uploaded the samples to ram and then just changed registers realtime (kinda like an Amiga but more powerful) instead of including a mixer, in the end however it was more about code-size than cpu performance, doing a 64kb intro you could shave off something like 3-10kb's compared to supporting a SoundBlaster card (depending on other tools) and those extra KB's was well suited for effects/art.

In the end though, people realized that the dosextender+GUS combo was as heavy in terms of code as just a mixer on Windows (since you didn't need a dosextender) and when better compressors arrived for Windows even the demoscene moved on.

Man, throwing away a GUS Classic 20 years ago alongside a bunch of other obsolete PC hardware was something I still regret to this day.

For reference, this card has been cloned at least 3 times now by hobbyists, but all the prior ones refused to release the source.

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-...

I built schlae's Snark Barker, a Sound Blaster 1.0 replica, and that was an exhausting experience. The sheer component count, sourcing chips that don't have modern replacements and sifting through counterfeit ICs, learning how to program old microcontrollers...

It was fun but I think my curiosity with assembling replicas of ancient tech is satisfied. This one looks more approachable.

I think the main problem will be sourcing one of the AMD InterWave chips. Those are (to my knowledge) not produced anymore and the only source would be another GUS card

FTA:

> 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.

Oh wow thanks, I had completely forgotten about the Ultrasound even though I loved mine back in the days.

this card was just the most gigantic pain in the butt.

> If you want to build this board, first make sure you have an AMD InterWave chip, the AM78C201. The design of the card is quite simple since essentially all sound card functionality is built into the AMD chip.

...it's a breakout board for an OOP chip that's impossible to find?

” 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”?