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Comment by inDigiNeous | Hacker News Reader

Remember getting this mod from my cousin I think on a set of floppies, and a bunch of other mods like the legendary Guitar Slinger by Jogeir Liljedalh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foAUeLcssmU

Listening to these on a 386SX/25Mhz machine with Soundblaster 2.0 (or Pro, not sure) I think, with those soapbox speakers that required batteries in a dark cellar room has embedded itself in my memory permanently, just entering a new world through the music and being awestruck as a pre-teen learning computers.

Space Debris still a favorite of mine from those days, another one that really stuck with me was Starshine by Purple Motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bvhGqCVHzA

Later I got the GUS, with it's signature warm and clean sound that no other soundcard really managed to replicate, mods sounding awesome on it.

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The Gravis Ultrasound’s main strength was that you could load samples into the card’s memory. In theory, this meant you could play tracked music that utilized its 32 hardware audio channels instead of mixing in software on the CPU.

In practice, the loop ‘click’ (as referenced in the article) was much more prominent. One of the first GUS mod players, MikMod, had to implement its own volume ramping to work around this. Tracked files with MikMod sounded great, despite the inaccuracies in reproducing the idiosyncratic differences between all the different tracked audio formats.

When the SB AWE32 and Pentium processors showed up, the advantage diminished greatly.

I share your fond memories of the Gravis Ultrasound. It was expensive and fiddly to setup, but when it worked, it just sounded so awesome. Nothing else really came close until the AWE32 came out a few years later. I still have some old PCs somewhere with various GUS soundcards in; including some rare ones like the GUS MAX and GUS Ace. I was surprised to see that GUS hardware in good condition is selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. I guess I should dig them out and see if they still work.

Yeah, it was not the best for games overall. But yeah, no other soundcard hardware could really replicate that sound of the circuitry built into the GUS, it had a special tone to it.

AWE32 and later cards were more perfect in technical and quality sense when playing back tracker music, but what was lost was the specific kind of tonal quality that GUS had when playing back.

"... and a bunch of other mods like the legendary Guitar Slinger ..."

I've been listening to that track for almost 30 years and I came here to mention it ...

I had it as a mod from an Amiga 500 then I converted it to mp3 at some point along the way and it's in my music collection.

I think another song I love "Chiba City Blues" was also originally a mod file ...

I first heard mods on a PC speaker. A bit noisy, but having only ever heard mono tones before, it was like black magic hearing some software vibrate that clunky thing to such effect.

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