To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Greetings all,
I just finished installing my 1meg of Dram into my GUS, and I came
across a few things I want to ask about. The chips in the card it's self are
100ns but the ones I installed are 80ns, Is it ok to mix? (the card now has
2 100ns and 6 80ns). The Dram tester says all clear. But when I played some
.mids some sounded a litte off, could it just be the programming of the mid
or can bad (fast/slow) chips cause a prob like that? Also, what is a GOOD mid
to show off the GUS. (I loved hidnseek, but it's short and limited) I'm looking
for a mid that plays a lot of different patches. Two last things:
1: When I try to play the Simpson mid I keep getting some "Unable to load program 7 to track 4) or something like that. (so the song isn't complete) I still
hear what has been loaded.
2: last thing, has anyone had any probs with Starcon][, for some reason,
it messes up what playing a few songs, (eg: an instrument in a song is replaced
with another instrument. or when I fire a missle from the earth ship I sometimes
hear the effect for the pkunk: "Goober, Idiot, etc....)
HELP.....
brian@ccnext.ucsf.edu
(I still love this card!!!)
(May all your GUS'es live long and prosper)
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 02:05:52 GMT
From: janicek@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Jana Janicek)
Message-Id: <C01v5s.JFM@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Subject: GUS Programming: The Repost III
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Okay, I am pretty sure that patches are not limmited to 64K as I
guessed earlier. I am in fact having the reverse as a problem in my patch
routines. I mean, I cannot seem to make my patches cut off where they
should. They all seem to cycle through the full meg of on board ram. But I
will keep on hacking untill I solve these problems.
Some more observations (GOOD and BAD):
**Remember that my routines are not yet perfected and many of the BAD
stuff is probably based on this fact.
First, the bad. We have heard before some complaints of a slight popping
noice when playing certain MIDI files with the GUS. Well, I thought I
would further investigate this. I listened to all sorts of GUS stuff,
(patch based). MIDIS do indeed (some more than others) seem to have a
popping problem. It is not very noticible at first, but the more you
listen, the more annoying it becomes. I found this same popping in Star
Control II, and again in the Modulatr (which is a BETA I should remind
people). The final place I found popping was in my own patch test
programs. So, I did some experiments. The patch I am using is the
spook.snd file in the ULTRASND/SOUNDS directory. I played this patch using
USS8, than I saved it from the GUS DRAM with my own routine to disk, and
than the fun began. It seems that whenever start_voice_playing is called,
the first thing it does is generate a pop. I was not 100% certain of this,
so I created a loop, and played the same patch through 15 voices with a
30ms delay between each one. The result was an awsome sound with a
distinct loud buzzzzzzz right at the begining. In other words, alot of
pops being played one after the other. This made my heart sink, could
GRAVIS have overlooked such a flaw in their hardware? I checked the patch
itself to see if there was any noise at the begining, I found a fairly
constant stream of values close to zero. This should not creat such a
distinct buzzing pop noise. I really really really hope this is a bad
patch or there is a fault in my routines that is doing this, but as I
listen to more and more GUS native stuff, I still hear the little pops. If
this is hardware, I hope the next revision addresses this problem.
Remember, I am merely making an observation, I don't want to start a flame
war, I hope I am wrong, but I cannot ignore my ears or those pops any longer.
Now, some good observations. I found that you can do some really cool
stuff with the GUS, one of my favorite things is creating an
echo/reverb/metallic effect by playing the same patch on several voices I
use about 6 to 10 depending on how pronounced I want the effect, with a
very small delay between each one (about 10..20 ms). This effect would
wave some really neat uses in games where they could use the same patch on
board the card to generate several different sounds. A really neat
effect, must be heard to be believed.
My next project is the Patchinator (cant think of a better name yet)
which will do precisly that mentioned above, using the special abilities
of the GUS to do cool things to samples.
-Later
------------------------------
Date: 29 Dec 1992 14:39:09 -0800
From: joseph@aludra.usc.edu (Jeff Lawson)
Message-Id: <1hqk2dINNqeu@aludra.usc.edu>
Subject: GUS Programming: The Repost III
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
In article <C00Cop.LDH@ccu.umanitoba.ca> janicek@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Jana Janicek) writes:
>And one final observation: This is just a guess, but I am finding some
>evidence to support this. Is it true the GUS can play patches only 64K in
>length? I have noticed that the Modulator often gives patch too large
>errors, and I had a look at the patches in the ULTRASND\MIDI directory,
>with the exception of one, all of the patches seem to conviently fit under
>65536 bytes (the larger one may be some sort of compound patch??) Am I
>just dreaming or is this substanciated?
I believe that you're dreaming. The reason why the Modulator gives
you that message was because I was in a hurry when I wrote the sample
loading routine and I try to load each sample in with one pass.
Unfortunately, you cannot have a string larger than 32k (that's really
the cutoff point, not 64k) in QuickBASIC (which is what the whole
program is written in, except for a couple of short screen updating
routines in assembly.) I could easily make it take more than one pass
to load a sample if it is too long, but right now I am in the middle
of converting the entire program to C and I'll work out those bugs as
well as other little things like stereo and wiping the memory faster
when I'm done converting. With that mentioned, don't expect the next
version out for at least a couple of weeks (there's over 5,000 lines
totaling almost 400k of source!)
---
Jeff Lawson
joseph@aludra.usc.edu
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 92 07:36:59 PST
From: bs@mda.ca (Bruce Sharpe)
Message-Id: <9212311536.AA01843@ mda.ca>
Subject: How to use user-created patches with Windows
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
>just got the new patch manager... am I to understand that you cannot load
>any user-created patches with it? And if so.. how?
>I have several patches I would like to use outside of the limited playmidi
>program (including Dion's)
>
The short answer is: You can load any patches you want. However, in any
given Windows session the driver (and hence the Patch Manager) can only
use the patches that were listed in the ULTRASND.INI file that was
read when Windows was started.
To use a set of patches different from the default ones, edit the
ULTRASND.INI file. (It lives in the directory pointed to by the environment
variable ULTRADIR.) This file has two kinds of information:
(1) Where do the patch files live? This is the PatchDir variable in the
[Ultrasound] section.
(2) What is the name of the patch file that goes with a given patch
number? This is what the lines that look like
0=acpiano1
are all about. That line informs that driver that whenever the
melodic patch number 0 is needed, it is to use the patch in the file
ACPIANO1.PAT that lives in the PatchDir directory.
Change the appropriate lines in ULTRASND.INI to point to any patches you
want to use.
When using the Patch Manager, the patch names shown will default to those
in the General MIDI set. You can use the Options | Preferences menu
command to instead show the names that are embedded in the patch files.
This lets you use any names you want, by putting them into the patch header.
(These names are not quite right in the current set of default patches,
hence you'll get a lot of ? marks when you choose this option with them.)
>do I have to mess with the midi mapper?
>
No. The MIDI Mapper can only shuffle around the patches that were named
in the ULTRASND.INI file. It is highly unlikely that anyone would want
to use the MIDI Mapper with the GUS. The Patch Manager does not go through
the MIDI Mapper. It talks only to the Ultra Wave and MIDI Synth device.
