Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica(github.com)

39 pointsby mariuz2 hours ago8 comments

sys425904 minutes ago
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
microtonalan hour ago
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.
mscdexan hour ago
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/
- ecliptik23 minutes ago
  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
nubinetworkan hour ago
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-...
marticode22 minutes ago
Oh wow thanks, I had completely forgotten about the Ultrasound even though I loved mine back in the days.
guff_sean hour ago
” 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”?
- yestergearpc11 minutes ago
  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).
- kalleboo36 minutes ago
  He did a live stream of some of the reverse-engineering work https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2814615896
naturalmovement5 minutes ago
> 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?
rohitsriram5 minutes ago
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