I remember coveting a friend’s MT-32 setup, but when the GUS came out it was gold. It could do amazing wave-table synthesis in an affordable card. The first time I played Doom with the GUS-rendered soundtrack I was blown away at how great it sounded. I long since parted with my own GUS that I had in the 1990s, and I often wish I held on to it. They seem to be much sought after collector’s items now.
Problem with a GUS (or any 30 year old PC part) is it's more likely to break which means you'd have to invest time and/or money in keeping it running. I sold off mine when I didn't have a working machine with ISA slots anymore.
I never realised they gave away cards for free, and always assumed it was because it was ideally suited to the demo tracker format.
Edit:6000 cards just for the demoscene seems like a lot to me though.
Agreed. I don't think the PC demoscene at that time even had 6000 sceners that were well-known enough for Gravis to send them sound cards.
I bought one just for Second Reality.
Did you? Second Reality worked fine on a Sound Blaster, and sounded only marginally different/better on a Gravis if at all. It was somewhat later than that, roughly around winter 1994-1995, that some demos started to work with the GUS only for music or used larger wave samples to make use of its RAM.
I believe I had read that the GUS was preferable for Second Reality, and coming from the Amiga it seemed like the cooler hardware, so that’s what I bought.
The gus offloads audio processing, whereas the sb16 requires more work from the cpu. Hence, the 3d scene at the end of Second Reality should be smoother on gus assuming a typical system of the era, e.g. 486.
This is true, but it's a small difference. It took only about 10% of a 486's CPU time to mix four to eight channels of wavetable audio. You'd never be able to notice or measure if that 3d scene was running at 11 fps instead of 10.
I had the first Gravis Ultrasound and I loved that card so much. I think I had the PnP version also later. Too bad the sound card industry kind of died when basic audio got good enough on motherboards.
I think the difference between sound cards was made irrelevant when CD-ROM games started using digitised audio instead of MIDI soundtracks.