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Gravis Ultrasound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible system platform. 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. Gravis understood early on that to get the demo scene's support would be a sales booster, so they gave away 6000 cards for free to the most famous scene groups and persons. The scene then quickly changed from being mostly Sound Blaster supporting to almost exclusively support the GUS. Many demos and intros made in the 90s do not work with anything but.
History
The concept of music in games was carried out by the meager PC-speaker since the PC's inception in the early 80s. When a game company called Sierra opted to make music for add-on hardware instead of utilizing the built in PC-speaker the concept changed dramatically. The two companies Sierra eventually started to cooperate with was Roland and Adlib. Sierra opted to make in-game music, starting with King's Quest 4, for the Roland M-32 and Adlib Music Synthesizer. The M-32 was the latter superior as it boasted a Wavetable-synthesizer which gives much better sound reproduction than the FM chip residing in the Adlib soundcard.
It is worth noting that a third actor quickly introduced itself onto this new-found market, Creative Labs. This company, due to good business sense and certain business tactics, managed to take over the market from Adlib, destroying that company in the process, which left Roland its only real contender for a long time.
Since wavetable cards were very expensive in the early 90s and the FM-synthesizer reproduced very mediocre sound, a new generation of sound standards were needed. The most notable of these are the Tracker standard and the General MIDI standard. The tracker format had existed on the Commodore Amiga since the late 80s but due to the PC becoming more capable of displaying better graphics and sound, the demo scene spilled out onto the platform in droves and took the tracker format with it. Typical tracker formats of the era inclded MOD, S3M and XM. The MIDI standard, like you would find on the M-32, consists of instructions on what note to play with what instrument. In other words, it is like a text file containing simple instructions on how to produce the sound. The problem with this is that you needed a high cost sound card to produce the instrument sound appropriately. The tracker format on the other hand, deals with sound differently. This format stores the notes and the instruments digitally in the file instead of relying on a sound card to reproduce the instruments. This opened the way for Gravis to enter the market with its Ultrasound.
The problem with the Creative sound cards playing this format was that it had to mix voices into one or both of it's output channels. When waveforms are mixed, there is a loss of quality in the output. The more you mix, the more quality loss you will have. The MOD format had 4 channels, which meant the Creative sound card had to downmix 2 channels. The sound loss of this might not have been huge, but when the Scream Tracker 3 were introduced in 1993 standardizing 16-channels, the Creative just couldn't keep up. Enter Gravis Ultrasound. Gravis solved the channel problem by having dedicated digital audio output channels for each track. Since the card supported 32-channels, the card almost instantly became the tracker's choice and thus the demo scene's card of choice.
The Classic Gravis Ultrasound The Ultrasound offered more than just channel support. It could play MIDI by loading instrument patches into RAM not unlike how instruments are stored in ROM on wavetable cards. It could reproduce 44KHz sound or CD quality. 16-bit sound could be achieved by adding a daughter card (later to be integrated onto the GUS itself and called GUS MAX) to the GUS and thus it had vastly improved sound quality for its time. The card was also cheaper than the standard Creative cards on the market.
There were many problems with the card. The main problem that Gravis faced was the lack of interest from the games industry to support their sound card. The demo scene had taken GUS to its heart but the game industry did not. They continued to support the most common cards such as Sound Blaster and Roland respectively. Many game and software developers also had trouble supporting the card. That the card did not have a FM-chip did not help matters either, as Soundblaster compability was difficult to achieve at best. The shareware games industry were more forgiving and started to release games with native Gravis support aswell as the other sound cards. Famous companies which did this in an early stage was Apogee and Epic Megagames. The support eventually got quite broad and Gravis decided to renew their sound card portfolio and release the Gravis Ultrasound MAX. After that, the Gravis Ultrasound PnP cards appeared.
Gravis eventually exited the soundcard business, and Sound Blaster reassumed dominance of the low- to mid-range soundcard market.
Technical Specs
The GUS was able to mix multiple channels of audio without using the main CPU, which allowed for complex music and sound effects with a minimal performance impact, one of the selling points to the demo scene.
It was remarkable for MIDI playing quality with instrument patches stored in its own RAM, having 32 audio channels.
The GUS MAX boasted the following sound-producing specs:
- Wavetable synthesis (instead of FM)
- 32 digital and/or synthesized voices
- 16-bit, 44.1 kHz CD quality playback
- 16-bit, 48 KHz recording
- 3D holographic sound
Sources
History of MIDI (http://queststudios.com/quest/midi.html)
External links
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