4/18/2021 0 Comments Gravis Ultrasound Emulator
This concept was similar to the handling of sample banks in digital samplers; some games including Doom, Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D came with their own optimised UltraMID.INI.It was very popular in the demo scene in the 1990s, due to its superior sound quality compared to similarly-priced soundcards of its time.The GUS was remarkable for MIDI playback quality with a large set of instrument patches that could be stored in its own RAM, having up to 32 hardware audio channels.The initial card didnt fully conform to the Multimedia PC requirement, due to absence of 16-bit audio recording and onboard analog mixer (used to control volume of analog CD, line-in etc.
The final revision (v3.74) of the GUS Classic featured 256 kB of onboard RAM (upgradeable to 1024 kB through DIP sockets), hardware analog mixer, and support for 16-bit recording through a separate daughterboard based on the Crystal Semiconductor CS4231 audio codec. CS4231 provided support for Windows Sound System specs (although the IO port range didnt match the WSS hardware) and could be used for SoundBlaster emulation. ![]() Featured 1 MB of sound ROM, no onboard RAM (although it could be expanded to 8 MB with two 30-pin SIMMs), and ATAPI CD-ROM interface. A Pro version added 512 kB of on-board RAM required for compatibility with GUS Classic. Marketed as a competitor to Wave Blaster -compatible cards, it was supposed to be installed alongside a SoundBlaster Pro16 card as a wavetable synthesis upgrade. This is the only Gravis soundcard with green circuit board and is similar to a few card clones, including the Primax SoundStorm Wave (model Sound M-16B) and the AltraSound. It has 1 MB RAM by default, but cannot be upgraded any further. Re-labeled Altrasound as Sound M-16B and different Sound M-16C with 4x CD-ROM Interfaces. Newer C revision of InterWave - AM78C201AKC and TEA6330T fader. The chip was actually derived from the Ensoniq OTTO (ES5506) chip, a next-generation version of the music-synthesizer chip found in the Ensoniq ESQ-1 and Mirage, as well as the Apple II GS. The chip had no built-in codec, so the sounds had to be downloaded to onboard RAM before they could be played back. Sound compression algorithms such as IMA ADPCM were not supported, so compressed samples had to be decompressed prior to loading. A CD-quality 44.1 kHz sample rate was maintainable up to 14-voice polyphony; the sample rate progressively deteriorated until 19.2 kHz at the maximum 32-voice polyphony. The polyphony level was software programmable, so the programmer could choose the appropriate value to best match the application. Advanced sound effects such as reverb and chorus were not supported in hardware, although software simulation was possible (a basic echo effect could be simulated with additional tracks, and some trackers could program effects using additional hardware voices as accumulators). The card came with a 5.6 MB set of instrument patch (.PAT) files; most the patches were sampled at 16-bit resolution and looped to save space. The patch files were continuously tweaked and updated in each software release. This architecture allowed Gravis to incorporate a General MIDI-compatible mapping scheme. Gravis Ultrasound Emulator Drivers Used UltraSoundWindows 9598 drivers used UltraSound.INI to load the patch files on demand. In DOS, the loading of the patches could be handled by UltraMID, a middleware TSR solution provided by Gravis that removed the need to handle the hardware directly. Gravis Ultrasound Emulator Free To IncludeProgrammers were free to include the static version of the UltraMID library in their applications, eliminating the need for the TSR.) The application programmer could choose to preload all patches from disk (resizing as necessary to fit into the UltraSounds on-board RAM), or have the middleware track the patch change events and dynamically load them on demand. This latter strategy, while providing better sound quality, introduced a noticeable delay when loading patches, so most applications just preloaded a predefined set.
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