The PicoGUS: An ingenious multifunction ISA sound card

Рет қаралды 70,281

10 ай бұрын

If you are into retro PCs, you probably know that the Gravis Ultrasound is one of the most expensive soundcards out there. It was used extensively in the early to mid-90s PC demo scene, and if you want to hear those demos as they were intended and on a real physical computer, you will need to splash out big cash for a Gravis Ultrasound card.
This is where the PicoGUS comes in -- it's a Gravis Ultrasound running inside a Raspberry Pi Pico2040 in an ISA card. No tricks here -- this really is emulating the Gravis Ultrasound on a $5 microcontroller! (It also can emulate several other cards too.)
The creator of the project sent me this card to play with, so let's dig into it and hear it running one of the best PC demos of all time.
-- Links
PicoGUS:
github.com/polpo/picogus
polpo.org/picogus/
www.tindie.com/stores/polpo/
Hand386:
www.aliexpress.us/item/325680...
Apple II VGA card:
• A software defined VGA...
github.com/V2RetroComputing/a...
PicoMEM:
• 0069 There is so much ...
www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?...
Second Reality: (Demo itself)
• Future Crew - Second R...
www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63
-- Music
2nd Reality by Skaven
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
www.mikseri.net/skaven
Surfing on a sine wave by FearofDark
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
fodxm.co.uk/
3D Galax by Beldoroon
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
Inner Strength by LASERLORE
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
Ice Frontier by Skaven
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
www.mikseri.net/skaven
Eternity by 4MAT
modarchive.org/index.php?requ...
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino

Пікірлер: 445

@ianpolpo 10 ай бұрын

Adrian, thanks for covering my PicoGUS project! I appreciate your honesty in showing what it can and can't do. Having your eyes on the PicoGUS and surfacing new issues has helped the project a lot already! For example, I've learned that the XTIDE does not play well with either the PicoGUS or a real GUS in some programs. Also I'll be releasing a new version of the firmware in the next couple days that addresses some of the other issues you ran into, like CMS emulation. I'll be restocking my Tindie store when more boards arrive, and of course the project is 100% open hardware and open source so everyone is free to make their own PicoGUSes!

@adriansdigitalbasement 10 ай бұрын

That's awesome news! Thank you Ian for the freakin' awesome open source project!

@fordesponja 10 ай бұрын

Hi @ianpolpo, have you considered doing a cardbus 2 or 3 version? Late 90s / early 00s PCs have things like the original Sound Blaster Live! to have complete hardware mixing and Sound Blaster 16 compatibility, but I think that was lost in the Audigy 2 series. My retro PC is a Thinkpad T42 with Win98 and the only good compatible sound card with Sound Blaster 16 capability for Win98 is a USB version of the Live!. Laptop users are very starved for a decent audio solution, plus a cardbus solution would also fix a PCI version, there are tons of cardbus to PCI or even PCIE converters.

@thicclink 10 ай бұрын

@ianpolpo i chatted with you a bit at VCF and wish I had room to pack literally anything extra in my luggage so I could have bought one of the PicoGUSes you had for sale. But this project gave me a reason to finally try my hand at surface mount soldering. I have some boards on the way and am looking forward to getting one put together!

@JapanPop 10 ай бұрын

Has anyone thought of a usb based version so we can use it with DosBox?

@googlehomemini2059 10 ай бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasementthanks to both of you, as even the best ideas die on the vine when people don’t know they exist, so kudos all round guys (and a big big thankyou for making me aware of how much my Gus is worth😊)

@JimLeonard 10 ай бұрын

The GUS was an all-or-nothing experience. It was either utterly incredible and amazing, or it effectively didn't work at all. Being in the demoscene, of course I had one. But I also had a sound blaster 16 in the same machine for games (in fact, I still do, in the same machine no less, in my crawlspace).

@AndrasMihalyi 10 ай бұрын

I had a GUS ACE and kept my first sound card a SB 2.0 for wider game support

@Lukeno52 10 ай бұрын

And I think that's what makes cards like this one so brilliant. Rather than gambling on a super expensive and rare original card, which may have a finite life span remaining, something like this allows far more people to try it out and find its abilities on a sensible budget.

@gregmark1688 10 ай бұрын

Those of us who couldn't afford that solution instead just resigned ourselves to spending an average of 3 entire days tweaking every time we bought a new game. ;/

@aaron74 9 ай бұрын

Couldn't have said it better. When GUS was natively supported it was incredible!

@RemkoBrugman 10 ай бұрын

For me, the "fuzz" about this card is that firstly, there were a lot of 64k demo's that required a GUS because of size constraints (along with some famous demo's like Dope by Complex) and there is no way to watch them on period correct hardware without a GUS card. And secondly, until the Pentium time there was a profound difference in sound quality (go compare Second Reality or Jazz Jackrabbit yourself, the difference is quite profound) because they could not afford interpolation of the sample data. For me personally, being able to watch those demo's from that formative period of my life on about the same hardware as I first saw them really adds to the nostalgia factor.

@hisham_hm 10 ай бұрын

Adrian, the GUS is a legend now because it was legend then. At least where I live (Brazil), we all owned SB16s or clones, but we all saw the GUS listed in the SETUP program for every game, and we could see the additional options it had in MOD tracker programs but we couldn't enable them... so for me growing up "Gravis UltraSound" was this mystical unobtainable thing. I'm sure lots of people my age shared this feeling, and the number of those willing to tick that item off their nostalgia bucket list definitely explains today's prices, more so than the card's actual usefulness.

@ChristianArnold5107 9 ай бұрын

The fact that this is being done on a MICROCONTROLLER is super impressive. Great work Ian!

@1BitFeverDreams 10 ай бұрын

I soldered my own PicoGUS early this year and it was destined for my 486. I'm a very happy camper since then. I have nothing but high praise for Ian's work. I made a comparison in the AnyBit Fever Dreams between it and the SB16 that I also have in the 486.

@exidy-yt 10 ай бұрын

I miss my GUS so much. It was the best investment I made in my PC since I jumped from the Amiga. For the first time I had sound better then in the 10 years older Amiga 500. I even sprung for the extra RAM to get more wavetable goodness on board, and the sound of 'SBOS installed!' was my startup sound for many a year. Regarding demos, it was Future Crew's Panic! megademo that blew me away visually and aurally. That card was just amazing.

@monkeywithocd 10 ай бұрын

The 'Tandy' 3-voice compatibility is the most exciting part to me. I think Sierra's AGI games can typically have 3-voice enabled separately from the graphics mode, and it'd be really cool to be able to get that improved sound without having to use a PCjr or Tandy 1000.

@JohnKiniston 10 ай бұрын

Yeah this is super exciting, I can slap the card in my xt clone and relive those Tandy games of my childhood without paying a premium for a 1000.

@BrandonBlume 8 ай бұрын

SCI games as well can utilize Tandy sound independent of Tandy graphics with each game's install.exe utility. Just need to select the appropriate driver. Other adjacent Sierra games too like Thexder 2 also have Tandy sound support in the same way.

@tarajoe07 9 ай бұрын

The explosion of these Pico cards is amazing and opens up so many possibilities.

@DavePoo2 10 ай бұрын

You could get a GUS, or you could just MIDI 8 Amigas together to get the same effect.

@chloedevereaux1801 10 ай бұрын

16 amigas....... not 8. 4 mono voices on 2 stereo channels........

@daishi5571 9 ай бұрын

@@chloedevereaux1801 16 Amigas would be 64 channels (16x4) so now you would need 2 PCs with GUS cards (2x32) to get that many.

@nickwallette6201 9 ай бұрын

@@daishi5571 But you might need two Amiga channels to do what one GUS channel could do - like pan something to the center.

@daishi5571 9 ай бұрын

@@nickwallette6201 From what I have seen, most tracks that use that kind of level of sample playback don't use all tracks at once. That would allow flexibility to move channels around if you really require centering or panning. Then I guess it's a question of what more important to you, ability to play a selected sample or deciding what side you want it played from.

@nickwallette6201 9 ай бұрын

@@daishi5571 Just squaring the math here. You said it would be 64 channels, but it's really not, because if you want to accommodate any stereo panning at all (beyond the mandatory half-left, half-right) you would need twice as many Amigas, and then use two channels per voice, with each side mixed to the level appropriate for where the original sample was panned. Since, by default, non-Amiga audio tends to be placed in the center unless panned otherwise, that would require 64 Amiga channels to accomplish what the GUS did in 32. That's all.

@jonmarler 10 ай бұрын

I still have two original GUS cards waiting for a good motherboard to pair with them. Watching the old demos really takes me back!!!! I’m glad to see that there are new options to keep this alive! Great video!!!

@PXAbstraction 10 ай бұрын

I saw this at VCF Midwest as well. So cool it basically started as a COVID project. As someone who recently spent way too much money on an Orpheus II card, I think this is so cool and I can't wait to see it further evolve!

@techdistractions 10 ай бұрын

It’s exciting to see these sorts of software defined cards. Love the video Adrian, comprehensive and informative as always 🎉

@DaneArcher 10 ай бұрын

Respect for the Second Reality demo, on the day of its 30th Anniversary :)

@Warlock_UK 9 ай бұрын

Oh man this looks amazing.

@horusfalcon 10 ай бұрын

The PicoGUS is a very interesting project. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

@BuddhaPhi 10 ай бұрын

Thanks for the awesome video, Adrian! That 2nd Reality demo has been my soundcard test demo of choice for nearly 30 years going back to a website I made in 1995 dedicated to the SB AWE series and other wavetable cards. I've got multiple original GUS cards and just bought one of the newer Orpheus II GUS PNP hardware recreations - which was uber expensive. So a much cheaper GUS alternative is a huge plus! I'm so amazed at all the great RP2040 hardware projects like this, ZuluSCSI and so many more.

@SiaVids 10 ай бұрын

The thing that is interesting about the Gravis Ultrasound Sound card was that at the time it was made available in the UK, the magazine reviews about it were very lukewarm. One of the reviews said it was red for danger and you were better off spending your money elsewhere. I disregarded all of that and went and bought the original 16 bit ISA version and then later upgraded to the PCI version. Such an incredible card 😎

@alvaroacwellan9051 10 ай бұрын

Wait. What PCI version....?

@googlehomemini2059 10 ай бұрын

@@alvaroacwellan9051 the pnp version for windows I assume

@MaggieKeizai 9 ай бұрын

Wow, those magazine reviewers were high on banana peels. What jerks!

@nickwallette6201 9 ай бұрын

Depends on what you were going to do with it. I was a PC audio enthusiast, so I knew what it was designed for, and I wanted it. I did eventually get an AWE32, but it came along so late that it missed the whole DOS wave table boat. I still got tons of use out of it in Windows, but I was always a little jealous of the GUS crowd. Even using the AWE with GUS patches in Cubic Player felt like a consolation prize. OTOH, I had a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 for a while, and although it was a nice upgrade from a Sound Blaster Pro, and a fairly well supported card, it was still a compromise re: compatibility. So for the average PC gamer or Windows audio user, the GUS was not a good fit. On the early ones, you even had to be mindful of on-card resource usage, and decide whether you wanted to prioritize quality or channel count. Or sample quality vs. available instruments. You really had to know what you wanted with the GUS, otherwise it _would_ let you down.

@googlehomemini2059 9 ай бұрын

@@nickwallette6201 with 1mb I never had that problem :)

@tcalixto4v 9 ай бұрын

My favourite demo. 😄

@retrobitstv 10 ай бұрын

Neat stuff; I will definitely be keeping an eye on this project! The MPU and other device support is almost more interesting to me than the Ultrasound emulation :P I also had an original GUS back in the day and was blown away by FC's Unreal and 2nd Reality demos but the gaming experience was lacking. The prevailing consensus of my local PC/BBS community was that the Gravis wasn't worth the trouble and it was really treated like a second class citizen back then. Funny how that attitude has changed in the present day. I traded mine up for an AWE32 eventually, which I still have.

@alextirrellRI 9 ай бұрын

So exciting that all these card emulations can be done on a Pico. This is the kind of thing that until recently I might have expected only from an FPGA, or possibly a Pi.

@kippie80 9 ай бұрын

It is the power of the PIO devices on that chip, a poor man’s FPGA.

@MadsonOnTheWeb 10 ай бұрын

That thumbnail is so nice

@sweetlilmre 9 ай бұрын

Brilliant video 😊 I built a PicoGUS and the first thing I tried was Second Reality, with the original tracks it's fantastic. What an awesome bit of kit and not too hard to build if you've got decent tools and some experience. Ian is a wizard, and super helpful.

@Roxor128 9 ай бұрын

One thing to try, given you've got two of them: Cubic Player supports surround sound via dual Ultrasounds. Front speakers from one card, rear from the other.

@naib_stilgar 9 ай бұрын

Proudly testing the picogus since the first beta release, it is an amazing project.

@overdriver99 10 ай бұрын

wow.. that's great introduction of PicoGUS. What an great idea! I did know that there was Pico ISA card for GUS emulation but I didn't know that it includes MPU401 intelligent mode and adlib card. MPU401 card function itself worths over $120. so I think this is very versatile card for retro PC gamer.

@aaronperl 9 ай бұрын

I spent so much time running demos on my 486/66. I had a Sound Blaster 16, so I had to use software mixing, and I just couldn't believe computers could be fast enough to do software-rendered 3D graphics, _and_ mix the music in realtime ... and yet the games at the time seemed so limited (of course, adding the level of interactivity required for gaming would have probably overwhelmed the CPU's capabilities). I wished I had a GUS, but the prices were far too high, plus the potential need for a second sound card. Second Reality was such an impressive demo. When you said you had to switch out the music I got worried, but the replacements you chose fit the original theme really well. Nice job.

@iandobson8846 9 ай бұрын

Wow! Another trip down memory lane. I have an original GUS around somewhere. I even had the MIDI interface for it, although I don't play any instruments! 😆 I remember the demo you play at the end of the video (gutted not to be able to hear the music though), it was truly mind-blowing at the time.

@0mnis14sh 9 ай бұрын

very nice project

@RetroTechChris 10 ай бұрын

I picked up one of these at VCFMW, such a cool card! And I have a hand386 too!! I'm excited for the upcoming Sound Blaster compatibility, that will be a killer app for the hand386.

@richardwernst 9 ай бұрын

Fabulous!

@HattmannenNilsson 10 ай бұрын

This looks like an amazing project. Finally something that is both affordable, practical, and on top, open so that other people can make their own, make future version when the components are superseded, or just make more available. Often times projects like these that aim to replicate old hardware only get a limited run and at prices only justifiable to true enthusiasts who really "need" it. Great work Ian, and thanks Adrian for bringing it to our attention! Too bad you couldn't play the original music from Second Reality. It kicks ass! /I am not an atomic playboy

@aelliixx 10 ай бұрын

I love the "PicoGUS Inside" on the box hahaha

@thomassmith4999 9 ай бұрын

I've built many of them, one for all my current vintage machine. Beautiful card. Long live the demo scene

@alextirrellRI 9 ай бұрын

Not only were wavetable cards replaced by CPUs/software wavetable options, but CDDA audio also contributed to their demise with CD games, and then audio tracks (compressed or sometimes not!). There is something kinda charming about MIDI/tracker music.

@crtified1001 10 ай бұрын

My love and need for original hardware waxes and wanes over the decades. I've reached the point now where projects like the PicoGUS are bringing together everything I love about the PC scene. Cleverness, innovation, grass roots work, camaraderie, and of course, stellar results. And last but not least, the very same principle of "wringing an incredible, unprecedented amount of greatness, out of very little resources" that underpins the likes of our beloved Second Reality. Things like this give elite, premiere experiences to many, many people who could otherwise never afford or experience it.

@50shadesofbeige88 10 ай бұрын

This is cool, I can't wait to get one so I can do side by side comparisons between the emulation and the genuine hardware. Emulation has come a long way.

@torafuma 9 ай бұрын

I waited thru almost the whole video thinking... is he going to run Second Reality?!?! Glad I was not disappointed! Love the FutureCrew and the Demoscene from around that era. This is worth the price of admission (getting a PicoGUS!). I know what I am getting for XMas!

@pseudocoder78 10 ай бұрын

I saw Gravis Ultrasound and I clicked so fast! Although I keep kicking myself for getting rid of my GUS ISA PnP. Hope the neighbor kid I gave it to got a lot of enjoyment and/or money out of it.

@DaT0nkee 10 ай бұрын

@FinnGamble 10 ай бұрын

Simply demonetazion. Unfortunately, so many people claimed to have written Purple Motion's 2nd Reality that he was forced to do this. He explained this on his Facebook page a few years ago.

@MaggieKeizai 9 ай бұрын

Ah, a good friend of mine had a GUS in the day, and it was the envy of us all. This new gizmo is exciting!

@flapjack9495 8 ай бұрын

The most important thing I learned here is that the original Gravis UltraSound I have sitting in a box a few feet away from me is worth some serious money! It hasn't been used since the 90s but I have a 486 I can use to test it. I'll have to dig up copies of some of these old demos!

@snakezdewiggle6084 2 ай бұрын

Awesome!

@yesterdaysrose5446 10 ай бұрын

Yes, there was a PC sound card that had a SID chip, called HardSID. I have one of the original cards for ISA bus, but my only computer with ISA slots (a Pentium 166MHz) isn't in full working order. Plus I'd need to find the software which is easier said than done.

@ianpolpo 10 ай бұрын

I'm in the process of getting HardSID emulation up and working on the PicoGUS right now! It took some effort but I got it playing SID music with SidPlay2/w, but it still needs a lot of work to sound better.

@Dorff_Meister 9 ай бұрын

That's so amazing. I love that people are using the Pico for this kind of hardware hacking! SO COOL!

@sv650touring 10 ай бұрын

The GUS was the only sound card I ever had. I picked it out of the Sears catalog when my aunt let me choose a birthday present. I had the exact experience with the GUS you described, except without a Sound Blaster. The compatibility hassles overshadowed the wavetable feature, but I still had a lot of fun with it. At the time, I thought I should have gotten a Sound Blaster, and now I wish I'd held onto the GUS.

@riccardoiovenitti8688 5 ай бұрын

Remember when I was 17 I jumped from an SB2.0 to a GUS PnP Pro with 2.5 megs of RAM...I was blown away. And from programming point of view...another story...struggled to output a sample with SB with that DMA setup and the same with GUS in seconds. A better SB compatibility would have allowed this card to stay some more time on the market...imho. I still have it in my old setup!

@OneBiOzZ 10 ай бұрын

soon enough retro computing will just be a bunch of picos talking to each other

@skershaw0602 10 ай бұрын

Is it a staggering coincidence that the release date for Second Reality (shown on the configuration screen) is exactly 30 years ago to the day?

@l3lue7hunder12 9 ай бұрын

I set my GUS to port 240 adding a soundblaster on port 220, and connected both using line in / out for a single output. Using the GUS for anything midi related, and the occasion optimized program such as a "Futurecrew" demo, while using the soundblaster for everything else worked really well. The biggest issue was freeing enough DMA and IRQ for this to work ... .

@MustangblueNYC 10 ай бұрын

Agree!! Software defined cards are the future. I'm looking forward to seeing multi-purpose single cards for legacy hardware (ie; combo of multi-IO of serial/parallel/SD2IDE, CD-ROM emulation, video (VGA/HDMI), sound, wifi). I envision this to be single card with a daughter board to support the additional external ports & Wifi antenna). Moreover, add onboard USB support to connect USB-storage and/or USB-Mice/Keyboard support and have the software defined card pass the IO data back. Hence, no need for DOS/Win9x USB driver support. Thoughts???

@JamesHalfHorse 10 ай бұрын

I had one and wish I still had it. A friend gave it to me. Had a daughterboard that hooked to an included cd drive. Midi and Mods were amazing. I am gonna have to check this out. I think mine was the pnp pro because I remember the sim chips.

@maxtornogood 10 ай бұрын

Sounds pretty neat I must say. As it gets harder to source original hardware having open source projects like this really matters!

@Englebert3rd 10 ай бұрын

I'm hoping one day we'll get an open source 3DFX card.

@kilianhekhuis 10 ай бұрын

@@Englebert3rdlol, I've never understood why someone would want that...

@therealchayd 9 ай бұрын

There's probably a ton of neglected GUS cards sitting in boxes in attics or storage units, with their owners being blissfully unaware of their increasing rarity. It's brilliant seeing projects like this that make this available to retro enthusiasts.

@Loki- 10 ай бұрын

0:19 I don't have a Gravis Ultrasound either, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!

@tamasstrezi 9 ай бұрын

Made my mod player, loading multiple mods into high ram(flat real mode), and had music blasting while coding for Assemby '94 demo compo. Oh, those were the days! Got a GUS Max from a sponsor :O

@thomashorstmann8524 9 ай бұрын

I am a Gravis UltraSound Classic v2.4 owner, I bought this card in the 90s and had a lot of fun with it. Luckily I haven't thrown away the card yet.

@burnte 9 ай бұрын

Love the Siri voiceover for the date correction! Lol

@cjh0751 10 ай бұрын

I bought an AWE32 and was really happy with it, but it was a pain for a musician to get the best out of it. I bought a Yamaha SW1000xg after that and did many demos on it . After spending all this money i realised that I really needed a hardware sampler so bought a Yamaha A3000. Not long after that apple had got their Logic soft sampler out. So musicians were trading in their hardware Akais, Ensoniqe and Yamaha samplers for software. Man you couldn't win back then with the progress in technology. I used hardware samplers because it didn't require flakey windows or mac software crashing all the time. Then here we are again, Everything back on the computer. Can't win. So I gave up and picked my guitar up again. So much easier.

@yorgle 10 ай бұрын

Projects like this are great to see! I worked at eTek Labs (formerly Forte Technologies) in the mid-90s. It was soon after the GUS MAX came out, and we were working on the software/hardware/drivers/tools for the Interwave chip, mainly for Reveal as the primary customer. Compaq took the design and made a version of the card for their PCs and Gravis took the design and used it for the GUS PnP. I still have a few boards around here and there. SBOS did decent Soundblaster emulation by hopping in through a patched EMM386, and would intercept writes to the soundblaster/adlib ports, and then figure out what patch to use. We had a library of about 100 games that we'd test with, and the SBOS guy honed in a lot of the settings for that emulation/interpretation. It wasn't perfect but it worked fairly well. IMO, You were better off just using SB emulation for digitial samples, and GUS/IW for midi music. ;D I'm open to questions about that if anyone's still reading this.

@Pickle136 10 ай бұрын

Hi Yorgle, did the Sound Forte line of cards fall under Forte Technologies? I have a SF-32 with the ICS Soundfont which was also use for Gravis cards. If so do you have anything on the card or ICS chip?

@ninehundredollarydoos 10 ай бұрын

It might be a bit before you arrived because you mentioned the mid rather than the early 90s but can you confirm if the GF1 chip made by ICS was based on the Ensoniq OTTO sound chip and did you guys license it from them? Just wondering if you knew about that since I don't think anyone ever did a proper one on one interview with Paul Travers about his days running Forte and asked him about that kind of stuff.

9 ай бұрын

About the copyright claim: it happened to me as well with this demo. It seems some "Russian girl by Chemistry" (or whatever) music contains some parts of the music of Second Reality. I quickly raised the "dispute" telling that it's a well known PC demo (even open source nowadays if I am not mistaken ...), and the case was dropped. Though it happened many years ago, YT seems to be much more crazy nowadays.

@freeculture 9 ай бұрын

Those songs are all in modarchive no? I never had the demo but they sound too familiar so they must be in my tracker music playlist. I listened to many songs downloaded from BBS in the 90ies (once i got my hands to a dos tracker music player for Sound Blaster).

@jeromethiel4323 10 ай бұрын

I love stuff like this. It lets people experience the hardware, even if they cannot afford the real hardware. But there is no replacement for actual hardware.

@RavageReeves 10 ай бұрын

The real hardware will plummet in price in 30 yrs when the cureent generation dies off and the next generation has no interest in buying old junk

@amateurprogrammer25 4 ай бұрын

Did you talk over the entirety of Surfing On a Sine Wave? Shame on you, Adrian! :D seriously though love your content and thanks for covering this amazing card!

@Lightrunner. 10 ай бұрын

Yeahhhhhhhhz Demo time🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

@BollingHolt 9 ай бұрын

8:34 I feel your pain. When I left my old job in 2007, I left an original AdLib and TI-99/4 (not 4A) up on display in one of my computer labs (sighs). So many things that are now of value that we considered junk back in the 90s and 00s have been discarded by me and so many of us. If only we knew LOL.

@ericclark9770 10 ай бұрын

I remember having a SoundBlaster AWE 32 card back in the day - a buddy of mine bought a Yamaha XG daughter card (WaveBlaster compatible) and let me borrow it for a couple of weeks - that was AN INCREDIBLE sounding combo...

@cjh0751 10 ай бұрын

I used to play the future crew demo in our flat in 1994 and my girlfriend couldn't understand why i was so enamoured by it. She just didn't get it. I'm like this is where the PC has taken over from the Amiga (with respect to Amiga owners). This ran on low 486 machines in 4Mb. Future crew really showed that PC was the future. It was a real turning point that showed the PC was the future

@Cherijo78 10 ай бұрын

I have one slot left in my IBM 5160, and I've been looking for a sound card for it. This might just fit the bill, particularly as it can emulate multiple types. Excellent!

@SiaVids 10 ай бұрын

Verses by Electomotive Force sticks in my mind, Dope by Complex and of course so many Future Crew demos.

@JenniferinIllinois 10 ай бұрын

If I had only known that GUS I had back in the day would be so valuable in the future, it wouldn't have been disposed of when it was no longer supported. I could have been rich (well at least for a couple minutes - hehehe).

@OtterlyInsane 10 ай бұрын

It's a 32bit dance party!

@volvo09 10 ай бұрын

It's on an 8 bit bus though 😀

@OtterlyInsane 10 ай бұрын

@@volvo09 true!

@jussikuusela7345 9 ай бұрын

I got a GUS Extreme with my PII-333 machine in 1999 - cheaped out by buying "old" hardware, yet had a major improvement to what I had previously. The GUS was something else when it came to MOD tracking, even if I wasn't very good at it, and that card had a built in SB clone as well.

@tylerdean980 10 ай бұрын

I'm not a huge retro PC owner, just got my first 486, but it was an industry machine so I have no sound, a card like this seems like the best choice for someone like me, it's cheap, and covers all the bases. And it's free software, which I always like to support.

@sniperviperman6400 10 ай бұрын

On a blue Monday I bought a Gravis UltraSound MAX. expanded it to 1MB and was indeed blown away with all the features, sound fonts and 'surround' sound. It did lack good SoundBlaster compatibility. After 2 years or so I changed it into a SoundBlaster AWE32 with 4MB memory and later added a Yamaha DB50-XG.

@solar3mpire 10 ай бұрын

I miss my GUS MAX with 1MB upgrade... all the tracker music I made with that card.

@britlion 9 ай бұрын

The replacement of 1982 for 1992 made me burst out laughing. Never change, Adrian.

@davidwilliams1720 10 күн бұрын

It has vintage in it's title, therefore it is collectable, therefore it is EXPENSIVE!

@_MasterLink_ 10 ай бұрын

I have an original Gravis Ultrasound, but I don't plan to sell. I do use it, though not as much due to the issues you mentioned with compatibility. I too have a SoundBlaster installed for that purpose (but only had an SB 1.5 left, I long lost my SB16 though it might be in my 286).

@Tommi-C 10 ай бұрын

I had the SB32. I loved that card. Was huge though.

@BrandonBlume 8 ай бұрын

Just for PSA, the Tandy 3-voice did not use an AY chip it was the SN76489/SN76496. I'm really excited I just bought mine the other day and can't wait for it to ship!

@2tailedfox711 9 ай бұрын

Already had one of the interwave replicants by David L like you showed, but still bought one of these from him at vcfmw because of the mpu-401 part. So cheap to be able to have intelligent mode without the extra strain on cpu from softmpu.

@fl4shi238 10 ай бұрын

Hi Adrian, GUS MAX's Crystal chip added support for Windows Sound System. It didn't add much support for DOS games. It didn't even add that great Windows support, despite its name. The chip added 16-bit recording capablities. There was card called GUS Extreme, which some ESS AudioDrive chip. That one had OPL-3 and SoundBlaster Pro compatibility. I had both of those cards in 90's. MAX's compatibilty with anything other than Ultrasound was terrible, except maybe the SW emulator for Roland MT-32 and Sound Canvas. Extreme had great SB support though; without any SW emulation. I never found any non-GUS supporting game or other program that didn't work perfectly with it.

@t.w.3 9 ай бұрын

I bought the GUS back in 1993 for approx $170 in a local computer store. Doom and some other games with a huge stereo system hooked up sounded crazy! I ran a Ess-sound card together with the GUS to avoid loading the emulation TSR that ate memory. Of course added DIPs to make it 1MB. Still have it and it works like new, not like my SoundBlaster which has a glitchy volume wheel. I'm on the wait list for a PicoGUS.

@wyldride 10 ай бұрын

Seeing the old Adlib Jukebox program reminds me of the song Parade.rol. I remember playing that all the time and converting it to midi and later to a mod file. It's my go-to beat when I want a dance-y song.

@ruediix 9 ай бұрын

As a note, on modern computers you can emulate wavetable synthesis with several specialty drivers and they are far better than the wavetable synthesis provided by the Microsoft driver in Windows. Additionally you can do full emulation of the SB16 and AdLib sound cards to the point that you can even play demos and games that utilize raw control of the OPL Synth. This is not to mention being able to emulate all those old chips like the Commodore SID or TI Sound chips.

@viscountalpha 9 ай бұрын

Dammit, I need one!

@appliedengineering4001 9 ай бұрын

WOW! I never knew that they had an actual sound card that would directly support tracker music formats. I knew about wavetable synthesis sound cards back in the day. But I always thought it was there to make MIDI files sound better. When I would play tracker/mod music on the PC. It never sounded as good as it would on an actual Amiga computer because the PC didn't have the actual hardware to play tracker music with like the Amiga did. It was all done with software mixing and it really didn't sound all that great. I would love to see the Unreal demos again if the GUS card could give their soundtracks that Amiga quality sound. But I'm not in any rush to run out there and spend a fortune on a now obsolete sound card.

@megan_alnico 10 ай бұрын

This looks like it would be fantastic for the dISAppointment project where Rasteri has been working to add ISA slots to modern PC motherboards. For $40 you could turn e-waste PCs into retro DOS gaming machines.

@ianpolpo 10 ай бұрын

You read my mind - I'd love to pair it with a dISAppointment adapter... or even make a version of the PicoGUS that plugs right into the LPC header!

@megan_alnico 10 ай бұрын

@@ianpolpo exactly!

@TechCellfish 10 ай бұрын

Dope

@TommyLeeBak 10 ай бұрын

I am very happy that a few months ago I was able to buy a GUS Primax clone for less than $10. It was just lying around among other junk at the local second-hand market.

@adriansdigitalbasement 10 ай бұрын

Someone didn't know what they had :-) And you scored

@danielmantione 10 ай бұрын

IMO the UltraSound PnP was a great sound card for DOS, and just a normal soundcard under Windows, since Windows software wasn't written to take advantage of it. The PnP had the advantage of not decreasing the sample rate when a large number of channels were in use and thanks to its large memory which did offer space for large sound banks, slightly better for MIDI games.

@nickwallette6201 9 ай бұрын

Definitely. If you were a DOS MOD/demo enthusiast, the GUS was the way to go. But with its limited RAM, channel count vs. mixing quality, and lack of hardware effects, the AWE32 was better for Windows and MIDI. Everyone else just needed to stick with a Sound Blaster 16.

@xantronix 9 ай бұрын

Oh yeah! 16 bit ISA cards can work in an 8 bit slot as a general rule of thumb, so long as the card can be configured to use an IRQ that would be present on an exclusively 8 bit ISA bus. Cheers!

@infopackrat 10 ай бұрын

On the subject of the Pico not being fast enough. It has been overclocked as high as 420 MHz using a clock divide on the flash. Maybe it shouldn't be pushed that far but double is easily possible.

@freddyvretrozone2849 10 ай бұрын

Adrian refer to the speed to manage the ISA Bus signals, based on what he experienced with my card (The PicoMEM) It does not work at 8MHZ because I never tried at this speed, so the code is not optimized for this yet. (There is still margin) That said, the PicoGUS use the Pi overclocked at 370MHz, not for the ISA Bus speed (Was working at 200MHz) , but to experiment OPL3 emulation.

@aaron74 9 ай бұрын

I had a Gravis Ultrasound back in the mid 90s! I loved that card. I was always so annoyed by the lack of native support for it by mainstream games back then, and it was a crime that Gravis didn't stomp Creative Labs out of existence.

@mikesilva3868 10 ай бұрын

Great 😊

@FightingForceSoulless 9 ай бұрын

I was expecting some Epic Pinball in this.

@OscarSommerbo 10 ай бұрын

I had an early GUS card that only had software emulation of SB16. But I never ran in to any issues with compatibility, as long as the TSR loaded and the game recognized the "SB card" it was smooth sailing. I think once I had to fiddle with iobase addr and/or IRQ. Sadly I chucked the card back in 1998-99 when I finally retired that computer.

@exidy-yt 10 ай бұрын

Yeah I found that SBOS on the original GUS had decent enough 'working' compatibility, but that the sounds themselves were often 'off', with many wrong notes, esp. with games like Xcom and Master of Orion.

@OscarSommerbo 9 ай бұрын

@@exidy-yt That sounds entirely plausible. I never really did any A/B testing and I don't generally pick up on "off" notes/sounds. But hearing Adrian's description just didn't gel with my experience of the software emulation.

@exidy-yt 9 ай бұрын

@@OscarSommerbo Totally understandable. For my part I had upgraded to the GUS from an original 8-bit Sound Blaster and am a bit of an audiophile so the missing and off sounds were very noticeable and annoying to me where they may not be to others. But yes this is almost certainly what Adrian meant by compatibility. It was enough to get me to replace the GUS by 1995 or so with an AWE32.

@EddieSheffield 10 ай бұрын

Oh cool. I seemed to have a knack for picking up weird stuff back in the day. I had a GameBlaster, I think around '87 or '88, in my IBM PC Portable and later a Laser XT Turbo I think. I eventually got a Prometheus Aria 16se which was also a wavetable card but was never very popular. The 'se' variant had some empty sockets and a connector for adding SCSI support that I don't think ever came out. I even went to an industry show around that time and talked to their reps there and even they didn't think it was going to come out. I think they folded not long after that. Shame, it was a nice card that I think had better specs than the GUS. Hard to find anything about them now.

@erroneus00 10 ай бұрын

While I'm not a retro PC guy, I see that this is a REALLY cool thing. (I'm a retro CoCo and occasionally C64 guy) It occurs to me this picoCard thing can be an EVERYTHING card. On the left side of the card could be an interface which provides expansion for all manner of controller types (floppy, various HDD formats, etc) but on the right it could ALSO potentially provide external IO interfacing. The use of the headphone jack to expand to a MIDI interface is just one example of what's possible, but because I also play with LEGO, I see a modular expansion framework which could probably host a range of IO types. If they expanded to using a nano pi, they could even utilize the HDMI out. They should absolutely modularize both the left and right side and maybe even expand horizontally into second slot territory to pull off the old style IO port on a slot cover with a cable going to the I/O board. If they are trying to make whole sound cards that can be reprogrammed, they may be wasting their efforts. Making a generic and modular board and making varieties of I/O interfaces would be the way to go. Then they could make just the one card and sell interface devices.

@Elkarlo77 9 ай бұрын

Little known fact about the SB AWE32: Some Versions are 48khz capable. Which allowed me to use it with my Yamaha DB50 XG for my Masterkeyboard AND i could play DVD on the 1Ghz Pentium. I needed the AWE32 for the 8MB of Extra sample rom, which could be slaved to the Yamaha DB50XG. Pinnacle of Keyboard Sampling and Playing in the 90's.