Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica | Hacker News Reader

Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica

github.com

105 pointsmariuz44 comments

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.

I was a Gravis Ultrasound Max owner just for Second Reality. That was Art.

Second Reality was art indeed, but the GUS didn't make all that much difference for it. The soundtrack didn't have higher rate samples for the GUS's memory to hold or more channels for it to mix. Later demos and games did use these capabilities, but for Second Reality, the GUS sounded just about the same as a 16-bit Sound Blaster.

I seem to remember to have watched a recent comparison on YT between Second Reality using SB vs GUS, and I did appreciate an audible improvement with the latter, but it may have been a placebo -- I admit you may be right, as sources seem to confirm that the track used 8 channels that minimised if not outright eliminated synthesis differences. I am not an audiophile or audio engineer by any stretch so more informed people will have to chime in here, but what I had going for me then was the fact I never had a Sound Blaster to compare with directly. I think the fact my card died mere months into my purchase, kind of prevented me from forming a more objective opinion on the quality difference between it and SB.

On a system of that era, some scenes look far smoother with the GUS than SB16. With the GUS running, the CPU could focus on graphics because the audio was offloaded to the GUS. This was particularly true of the 3d flight scene.

My GUS replaced an 8 bit sound card. The difference in 2nd Reality was night and day!

Yeah, it infused my software engineering career and interest in optimisation and 3-D rendering.

P.S. When we invent the time machine, we should go back to load up on actual GUS _and_ spread the word for people to never install it horisontally :-)

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

Seems like the chip is available here: https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/762821.html?srsltid=AfmBOoraT...

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.

This is how I heard about it. I never had access to anything like that. The idea that you could load samples on to it was out of my reach. All I could do was midi programming on my Yamaha XG50. But it never sounded professional. Then I discovered the world of music trackers and that carried me until fruity loops came along.

As someone who couldn't afford it, I always felt excluded when developers have not implemented any alternative, like if someone had plain sound blaster clone.

Im not familiar of any software that would do that. If anything people who bought GUS felt scammed when it turned out its Sound Blaster emulation (SBOS/Mega-Em) was somewhere between barely working and totally broken.

GUS selling point was offloading sound engine to hardware mixer, but by the time UltraSound PnP released CPUs were fast enough for fully software GM.

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.

Hey! I'm pretty sure I stayed at your apartment around 2003 with shock and ript when we were travelling around Europe going to demo parties!

You went by that g nickname back then right? Remedy 2003 in that cramped student apartment.

Yeah I’m pretty sure I was using bananaboy back then! That’s right Remedy, I was trying to remember what the demo party we went to was. That was a lot of fun, I have fond memories of that trip!

Ah sorry for being coy, the G was meant to be a shorthand for gyr or am I misremembering?

Ohhh gotcha! Gyr was another scener from Queensland. I don’t think he was with us on that trip. I think it was just me (Sam - bananaboy), shock (Raj), and ript (Dave)

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.

I gave away all my ISA cards for free, including my AWE64 Gold.

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-...

Huh I had no idea these were in demand.. I still have an original GUS card in a box somewhere. I forget the exact model but it was one of the better ones.

They seem to be going for $GPU on eBay …

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?

It was used on other sound cards as well, you don't have to get one from a broken 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”?

Eric is a very well-known reverse engineering hobbyist. He's RE'd several boards over the past several years, all are on his github. He also has built several novel designs from scratch (Such as the Graphics Gremlin - a FPGA-based MDA/CGA card that outputs to a VGA monitor).

You didn't mention that he also co-authored the book "Open Circuits" that shows cross sectional images of a wide variety of electrical and electronic components. The pictures are beautiful.

His "secret" is basically sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Circuits-Beauty-Electronic-Compo...

Cool.

Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.

If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.

Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.

This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.

At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.

That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?

For me, one of the saddest side-effects of modern generative AI is this apparent rise in an attitude of “I don’t know how to do this, therefore anyone who does this must have just one-shotted it with AI”.

Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.

As far as I can tell the person you are replying to has never posted anything of value or substance, maybe they should start using AI more

If this is the case, they should start using AI less.

He did a live stream of some of the reverse-engineering work https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2814615896

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