Hey, I'm actually the seller of this card. Really glad you got it working! I was afraid it might have been the GF1 flaking out as I heard those are a common issue. At least it wasn't too difficult or expensive to repair. Couldn't have asked for a better home for this card. Small world to be recommended this video, haha. I bought it as supposedly working about 9 years ago, but I had similar issues back then so I got some more of those RAM chips to try it with but it was always acting weird so I stashed it for years and then tested it again to see if I could figure out the issue and clearly I could not so I listed it as not working/for parts, and the rest is in this video. :)

Too bad the new old stock crystal I sent was also flaky, but that's great that you've found a substitute that is much easier to source. It sounds like it works just as well!

Crystals are highly dependent on accurate capacitors. By touching the case you were adding capacitance. I would have looked at replacing the capacitors at each leg of the crystal with new ones of the correct value - that would also explain why the new-old-stock crystal showed similar errors.

At 9:33 the evil from beyond tries to communicate with our world using the GUS as its vessel.

The demon Gravis of Ultrasound spoke!

This channel really hits the retro nerd nostalgia spot!

man this takes me back!! I haven't even thought about the GUS in 30-ish years.

If that card is for your 486, then you are working on your 486 build!

A very good video that shows that even clock crystals can go bad and when they do, funky stuff starts happening! Like your bad crystal made the GUS sound like a Walkman that's running low on battery

Excellent! You know at the very beginning of this video and hearing the issue I just had this hunch it was the clock crystal. And it was. What a simple fix and what a relief it was not that GF1. Good job! Another saved GUS!

Crystals failing to oscillate with IC built-in oscillators is a common issue e.g. with old microcontrollers. Adding load capacitors is often suggested, but often doesn't help. What often helps to make the crystal more compatible is loading the oscillator with a resistive load. Something between 47kOhm and 470kOhm between the crystal pins often helps. Load capacitors decrease the frequency and also the amplitude of oscillation making it weaker, so they might the wrong cure. Try touching the xtal pins with resistor pins, but don't touch it with fingers. Cheers!

I still remember the sheer joy and awesome-ness of hearing Doom for the first time on the GUS. I understand why people pay a fortune for them. Nostalgia is so damned expensive.

I really enjoyed watching your journalism from diagnosis to fix My only regret with the video is that after you’d fixed it and upgraded the RAM I was expecting a showcase demonstrating the best of the GUS! It was a bit of an anticlimactic finish 😊 Looking forward to your next repair job

I've honestly had so much fun watching your videos (been on a bit of a binge the last few days lol). I've learned SO much! I have to say though, this is the first time I've watched one of your videos and the very moment I heard the midi playback go distorted and slow I was like "THATS A TIMING ISSUE! I Bet the oscillator is duff!" and literally pointed to that very component on the board!! lmao I wouldn't say I'm exactly clueless when it comes to electronics, but I wouldn't have had a clue three days ago before watching a load of your videos so thanks for the huge amount of education boost :) You have a new subscriber!

Very nice job repairing this great sound card :) I still have my GUS MAX I had as a kid. I remember I felt I had something luxurious when I could select the "Gravis Ultrasound Max" as the sound card instead of sound blaster. I have also bought the GUS Classic for my 486.

Great work 👌

0:08 Gravis Ultrasound was my dream wish from 1992. I finaly bought used one in something between 1994-1995. I remember even now the voice of guy who was speaking "SBOS install" when you load an emulation of sound blaster in dos. such a memories.

Good job!

Super film ciekawy i fajnie zmontowany, super że się udało

Was fortunate enough to find one for $100 few years back. Sounds are great, but it took 2 weeks of figuring out, before I heard the first sound out of mine. I even assumed it was dead. I can imagine why it would have such a high return rate back in the 90's. Back then, if you spent a day and it wasn't running, you probably also assumed the product was defective. Sound Blasters were plug and play. A lot less hassle. No complex BIOS setup. No jumpers on the side. Bring it home and start playing 10 minutes later. I also went with SB, even though my father wanted a GUS. At the time, SB was cheaper.

Lol 9:32 sounds like the card was possessed. Great video. Just found your channel. :)

legendary North Fraser Way, Burnaby BC ftw!!

Amazing job identifying that, I've knocked my head around problems of the sort for hours before. Also, great provisory fix with the grounding. It's great that you replaced with another crystal that can be found, that'll serve as a reference to anyone with the same problem. Great video.

"I'm afraid your friends will find this gravis ultrasound is fully armed and operational!"

I Had this in my 386 DX40 system. I loved it. Unfortunately someone stole it from me. One of build made in the first 100. Good old days, when i went to a demo party and i have shared it with coder to finish the job to debut the demo on the very same night to the audience.

A very good video, more about GUS please. Best regards 👍

Love your low key channel, the vids are relaxing and it's cool to watch you learn.

I have a version 1.0 Gravis Ultrasound, one of the original 10 PCB's that were sent by Gravis to Finland after the Assembly 1992 demoparty, Gravis was looking for programmers to write code for the GUS and I was lucky enough to get one of them. I spent my college days with it. I wonder what it's worth :D

The "touchy finger" helped me repair a Voodoo1 with an open 0R resistor on TMU mem RAS line, and an A500 board with some broken traces under the Denise socket. Nice to see how your fingers do the diagnosis just as well ;-) IMHO if you've got ongoing audio or visual problems then touching stuff is always worth a try.

I think i had similar problem with ESS card. Gonna try later to replace the oscilator

Haven't touched my card for more than 20 years, at least I know what to expect and where to look if it doesn't run. Fun fact mine had, at the time, the PAL chip go bad, had it send to CA for warranty.

Very lucky repair (as in trivial to perform) but also shows the importance of a) cleaning b) a proper physical inspection (preferably with magnification and c) live testing. Having a scope for things like this is obviously very advantageous because you have diagnostic certainty over signals. Really need to get one. Really happy to see this GUS repair and in good hands!!

Grounding a crystal case is normally done in a circuit. You can pull a higher frequency crystal to a lower frequency with a really small capacitor. You could try using a "gimmick" capacitor to pull a higher frequency crystal lower. It's simply two insulated wires twisted together but isolated form each other. The harder you twist the wires together the lower the frequency. Solder the gimmick to the two crystal pins. You can Google "gimmick capacitor" to see one and yes, they are as simple as they look.

Man it sounds like you're Baroque music is possessed.

Hello vswichzero! Sorry for being late to the party on this video! Totally would have wanted to be onboard at broadcast time! I'm a GUS Max owner, with card working as expected in 2023. There are a few questions about how these work when they are working properly that I might be able to help with.

I bought a GUS in 93 with my own money. I read up and understood the potential for the wavetable stuff, but sadly almost no games supported it. So to me, it became a slightly flaky SB emulated in software. But I never had any huge issue with the emulation. Some time around 95, into the trash the card went, mainly because of cheap SB clones and the disappearance of the 16 bit ISA slots.

9:35 i love it

Pretty nice work, informative and telling it as-it without hype. There was one new, card only v3.7, listed on eBay for $400. It lasted quite a while before the seller discounted it to 375 and it was sold.

This was great, so glad you got it back in order after an interesting journey! Had to laugh out loud the first time it glitched out, wasn't quite prepared for that sudden turn from lovely music to agonized voices from the fiery abyss 😂 To me who who is a relative super-amateur when it comes to electronics that whole "works if grounded" thing seems very bizarre. I feel like I stubbornly would try to keep the original and "make it work" in as clean and stable way as possible when it is that close / works under the right conditions.

Nice video, Quartz crystals are physically very fragile parts. It's basically a quartz disc pinched in 2 places for the electrical connections. It is basically impossible to weld / solder on the crystal as the temperature would cause it to crack. Grounding the case of crystals is common practice, probably for the stability of the oscillation or to remove stray capacitance. Depending on the topology serial resonant or parallel resonant capacitors of a few pF can be used to adjust the fundamental frequency. Also, measuring crystals in circuit is tricky because the probe itself has a built-in capacitance (usually 10pF) that is not negligible and that can destabilise the oscillator.

We lusted after a GUS back in the day... Ended up with a TB Maui & SB AWE64...

I've used Euroquartz before now for custom crystals. Not the cheapest in the world but they have low MOQ and will make basically anything you like.

The failed midi sounds are from nightmares!

In owning several GUSes over the years, including launch day, I've never seen (heard!) that kind of failure before. That's bananas. One thing to note: While the difference in your replacement crystal is very small, it will likely affect some amiga MOD songs played in modplayers that support the GUS, specifically any song that uses a looping sample (like a drum pattern) that was calibrated to loop on the beat right as the sample ended. Those might have audible beating ("judder") when played. But a slightly slow GUS is better than no GUS at all :-)

Great work bringing it to life. However.. As others mentioned, it is probably not a bad crystal but auxiliary capacitors that are bad. They are usually external to the crystal. and need to be rather specific values, to form a part of resonant circuit. I would desolder the crystal, and measure capacitance and resistance of each pin to ground on the board, then trace where these caps are (usually few pF), they should somewhere close to the crystal, and preferably replace.. The new crystal might be working, but if the caps are still there and have high ESR, this could cause issues in the future or a short. However, looking at this board I do not see any obvious places for these caps (C20 is connected to a different net, so it is not it). If you check the rev 2.4 board, there are some, but on 3.7 I do not know where they are. If there are no external load caps, then new repair should be fine without them either. My guess is that the old crystal when it was new was working fine, but due to aging and moisture, it got slightly different driving characteristic.

PRO TIP: use SBOS and play a bit Wing Commander 2 with the GUS. I guarantee, its interesting!

I have a laptop designed in Hungary,1987, that accepts 2 cards like this one. I have bought a Sound Blaster 16 for it already. Now all I have to do is to get the laptop's PSU recapped and ready to have stereo sound.

that is why these crystals having a ground connected to the can for 100% stable working and the only way for these old crystals to work fine is the ground with the can

Some very helpful tips in the comments to nail down the issue with this card. A short follow up video perhaps?

Good video and repair, just some observations. Maybe, just perhaps, the crystal might be fine, and the problem is elsewhere, a broken solder joint or trail, or potentially a bad capacitor. Something could be overheating after some time, hence not having issues at first and problems steadily getting worse. Using a slightly slower crystal, makes things run slightly slower and use slightly less power, causing stuff to heat slightly less.

I remember this thing. Was a nice upgrade back in the day. I wonder what ever happened to mine.

9:17 I was washing dishes by myself at night while watching your repairing videos, and I literally threw my bowl to the ground when I heard that! Horrifying LMAO! 😂 Great video tho🎉

Oh a GUS... I remember this card (and the gus max) used in the demomakers vidéos with the their great sound. But personnally i prefer the Guillemot maxi sound 32 wave FX with the daughter card ( a Real Korg wave table for great sound with midi files).

I still have my original GUS 'classic'. But I'm fearful of actually using it so I've just ordered a 'PicoGUS' to pop in the P-III retro PC I'm building. Great you could get yours up and running again.

I have a 3.7 too, which I upgraded to 1Mb of RAM back then. I haven't tried it in years, but if they are worth so much I really should find a motherboard to see if it's still okay!

ahhh the beauty of the isa bus :_)

Thanks for the video. I have several different GUSes stored in my basement. I wonder do they still work...

Nice job! I wonder if there really is any difference in sound between the original crystal and the newer part. I have a GUS Max 2.1 and paid a decent price for it a couple of years ago, next to nothing compared to what it costs today. This retro hobby is getting very expensive! 🥴

I''m still kicking my ass for casually throwing out my Voodoo3 2000 PCI, AWE64 Gold, and Gravis Ultrasound (with a full 1MB of RAM!) during a hardware purge about 15 years ago. :(

I remember getting a chip puller when o was a kid. Wow was a game changer haha 😂😂

Holy shit i somehow thought it was the cryastal while u were cleaning the sockets. Idk why it made me think the crystal is bad. Most likely it was my experience with these crystals going bad often

Giving away my GUS is one of my deepest regrets, one day I’ll get another.

The Gravis Ultrasound sounded haunted

With a crystal that's really close you can tune it closer by adjusting the load capacitors in the circuit. You could take a lower crystal and then try reducing the series load capacitor values to nudge it up. Or i suppose you can take the higher crystal, and tack a ceramic capacitor across it to nudge it down. Though i don't expect the adjustment range up to be above 0.05%, and you need a 0.5% up; down you should have more latitude, but you'd need to go whole 12% down, which is a tall order indeed. Programmable MEMS oscillator next step? Then again it might not be needed. 0.5% difference is just on the audibility threshold in direct comparison, so as you concluded, you can't hear it especially if you don't have a reference, you wouldn't be wrong on that; on the other hand, this sort of disparity between different system clocks wouldn't be entirely out of the ordinary so the software may need to account for it anyway by using GUS as the time base.

Used to have the GUS Max for a while with the extra memory slotted in for wave tables. wasn't really happy with it because it wasn't 100% Sound Blaster compatible in the later games.

I bought one as a teenager in 1993 and it costed about 147$ with 1mb memory. Retro hardware has become ridiculously high priced!

I'm sure I got one of these and the Voodo 5 graphic card too somewhere in a box :) I may have to dig it out... if they become this pricy :)

If the card gives you problems again you might want to check the decoupling capacitors around the crystal.

I do have one in a 486 build complemented by an orpheus.

Usually crystal are cacitive loaded (maybe the two yellow cap?).Weaker crystall can soffer for wrong loading. Maybe the correct vintage one are not so strong like the modern one and a sligly drifter capacitor can stop it to work properly.

I amazed HOW repair depends on some random find, this time by touching...

Hey new here I love your content and I can relate with many points you make haha. I am more Into retro consoles than Pc's but I have my fare share of Pc's too haha. I also need to do a bit of saudering on my stuff and I am kinda new to this. I also don't have any good equipment so I wanted to ask you what you use. Thanks

Hey, it's a fantastic video! I'd like to ask, after you fixed that card, have you tried to run the ultrasnd/setup and see if the DMA tests are OK ? I am qurious, because I am facing some very similar issue. DMA tests are fail, but the MIDI tests are sounds well. (AFAIK Midi playback dont need DMA.)

Maybe Gravis ran out of 19.66 crystals and just stuck a 19.4 one in there they had laying around lol!

I forgot to ask you.. Where did you obtain the ram test software for the GUS Classic? I have the 4.11 installer as well but it does not have this tester. I would love to test the 1MB onboard mine. If you can let me know it would be greatly appreciated!

I wonder how different frequencies affect the card... Great repair :)

I don't think that crystal frequency matters at all. If I'm correct GUS never plays bit exact same anyway. Commands to GF1 are sent by io port in system time and synthesis plays at in its own clock. So sent commands can actuate on sample or another. Also I bet no-one can hear such minimal pitch shift.

The one I have is older i guess because it has ram sockets on the tail end.

reminds me i need to find drivers for my pro audio spectrum.

I'd like to see if you play a A4 Piano note with the card if a chromatic tuner tuned to 440 Hz to see if it reports the correct tuning

Stupid question... what's the handy portable scope you used here? I've been dying to get one that doesn't cost $1000, lol!

i think i have a gravis ultrasound version in my shed somewhere laying around i know its an isa, thats why i stoped using it.. your going t pickup the mailcosts if you want it. last time i used it in a cyrixdx40 it worked but thats ... 30y ago?

is it possible to make a card with a pci or pcie connector for new computers? As an example of a name - pcigus or pciegus (translated from Google)

I saw one thing you did wrong.. the IC extractor, you pulled with lifting force to extract the chip.. instead you should press the extractor together with your hand and the tool force the chip out..

9:18 that was demonic...

What is the Model# of that snazzy Oscilloscope please? And UGH.... I scrapped all sorts of old ISA/PCI/AGP cards about 5 years ago.. Not thinking they were worth anything... Buffalo Computer Recycling hopefully made out.. PS. Gravis cards were notoriously a PIA to install.

My initial thought was demon possession, but then I realized it was probably a clock crystal. Always rewarding to turn out correct :D

Put a 47pf capacitor from the crystal oscillator pin to ground

Just ground the can on the crystal and be done with it. A couple picofarad cap across the crystal would probably also fix it.

Hi, I found in my basement a Nesxa 80386SX motherboard rev 0.5. Is it worth something?

What scope model you are using?

they said to not touch the components while the computer was running 😬 😅

aren't the creative soundblaster cards way better?

who expect at the end with 1mb ram to listen some more music ?

LMAO it sounds like it's possessed.

I have the knockoff altrasound :)

Perhaps the crystal capacitors are bad and out of spec.

song0.psm is a tracker module