To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Hi,
I've uploaded a beta version of mod player for Ultrasound , GUSMOD v0.1, to epas.
This version is functional but still quite buggy. The reason I release is that I, myself alone, can't find all the bugs. Please report your bug findings to 'yuri.lee@canrem.com'.
Thank you..
Yuri Lee
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 93 23:06:53 -0800
From: Andrew Krenz <uznerk@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu>
Message-Id: <9301030707.AA20191@hub.ucsb.edu>
Subject: My first experience with the GUS
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Welp, I FINALLY got my GUS over hte christmas breakthe Christmas break. Now that I'm back at
school and I can use my e-mail, it's time to file a report.
For starters my machine is a 386-40 with the notorious OPTI cheipset. More
on that later.
Anyway, I got it out of the bos, noticed it was rev. 24.4, and plugged it in.
I started the installation and everything seemed to be going okay, hwhen all
of a sudden t, half of the files which were being extracted with the un-lazh
program it comes with were reporting CRC errors! Great. I even figured
out a way to use old fashioned LHA to un-arc the files, but it did the same thing. (ACK) Anyway, I quit the install program to try and figure out what was
going on when strange things started happening, system wide. My "go" utility,
which is kind of like NCD to change directories, worked on some, but when I
used toit to change to other dirs, it bombed my machine! Next thing I knew,
I was getting errors on my stackjerer drive, and when I tried to run the
scheck program , it said "Invalid Optinon" . I didn't even specify anything!
HThen finally, it did work, said my stacker drive had errors, but it couldn't
fix them because the drive was "write protected." Wonderful. The GUS had
just somehow nuked my whole stacker drive. Luckily I had most of my stuff
backed up. Well, I looked inside my computer and thought, hey, maybe I'll
change the jumper on the motherboard that controls the bus speed from 11mhz
back tdown to the normal 8mh.z. Voila, didn't have any problems since. The
installation went pretty much flawlessly from there., and the rest of the
computer behaved normally as well. Anybody else have problems running the GUS
with a higher bus speed?
The first thing I did was try to play some of the miMIDI files I collected.
I remembered how cheesy the demo00xx.mid files had sounded through my old Adlib
card, but I trie3dd them anyway. Amazing?! This thing really had impressive
sound wuality. WIt was the first time I had ever heard the GUS. Anyway, next
on the list was to try out StarControl II. Yep, one of the first things I noticed (ACK, why didn't I run elm?) was the problem everyone else said about ho w
the GUS plays the wrong samples occasionally. It was pretty severe though,
almost half the samples it seemed were the wrong ones. I quit the game
and reconfigured the GUS to DMA 5, and not a problem sinvece. StarcontSC2 is is
pretty much perfect except for that one other effect that keeps playing
garbage forever (the SC2 on a 1meg GUS problem that everyone talked about).
BTW I expanded it to 1 meg the day after I got it.
The windows drivers installed fine, not problems there. I especially am
impressed on how you can play a MIDI file with media player and play a
.MOD with WinMod Pro at the same time!
Finally, it was time to try SBOS. I brought with me the newer 1.22 version
before vacation, so I copied that over the old version and tried it out.
First game was Wolf 3d. Bomb. Complete system halt. Does i t with every
wolfsbos option. Then I disabled QEMM and went back to Himem.sys. Nope.
THEN i tried turning the turbo switch off, down to about 14mhz. Now about
50% of the time the game EWIWILL load and play music (albeit rather cheesily
compared to the old Adlib), but the first time I tri y to open a door
or shoot the gun (or do anything with digital effects) the system hangs up
again. Is this because of the OPTI chipset?
SBOS refused to run a lot of thermy games. I only got it to work with aln old game
called Continnuumuum (which sounded pretty good) and a Psygnosis adventure game
called Obitus (pretty good sounding too). Ever other game I had refused
to run with SBOS, most ofter n crashing the machine altogether. to the point
I had to use the reset button.
When I have time I'm going to pick up the newest SBOS V1.23 as well as the
new windows and patch manager stuff. Hopefully the newer SBOS program will
like my system better. (BTW, the older SBOS, 1.20, had the same problems as
1.22 on my system.)
Thanks for all of your help,
-Andrew Krenz
uznerk@mcl.ucsb.edu
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 93 16:53:36 PST
From: bs@mda.ca (Bruce Sharpe)
Message-Id: <9301040053.AA19964@ mda.ca>
Subject: Patch Manager and MIDI files
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
>How can I use the Patch Manager to load the patches I need for a
>midi file...
You use the "Get from MIDI file..." command under the File menu.
>If I still have to exit my program to reload the patches due to
>conflicts then it's rather pointless and all the nice gimmicks and stuff
>don't ease the problem of having to keep exiting programs like cakewalk
>and cadenza to load patches...
Windows will only let one application have a particular MIDI output device
open at a time. The MIDI device has to be open before you can load patches.
Thus if your music app has the MIDI device open, Patch Manager's hands are
tied. Some applications release the MIDI device when they are not actually
using it (e.g., WinJammer), some hang on to it as long as the application is
active (e.g., Band in a Box).
I would say that this is a nuisance rather than being completely pointless.
I've used Band-in-a-Box without too many tears...
Bruce Sharpe
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 93 11:17:53 PST
From: yuzik@sfu.ca
Message-Id: <9301021917.AA20895@fraser.sfu.ca>
Subject: QEMM and SBOS
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Hello Everyone.
I have had some people report that they have experienced slowdowns
when running SBOS and QEMM with certain games. I am happy to report
that Advanced Gravis is working on this with Quarterdeck, at their request.
What we need, for testing purposes, is a list of programs where this
happens. Please e-mail me with a complete description of your
computer, what version of DOS you use, your configuration, your GUS
settings etc. And don't forget to include the name and publisher of
the game that slows down.
My e-mail address is chris_yuzik@sfu.ca.
Thank you.
regards,
Chris Yuzik
Account Executive
Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 09:24:46 -0800 (PST)
From: jayward@mailhost.cs.pdx.edu (Jay Ward)
Message-Id: <9301021724.AA24996@rigel.cs.pdx.edu>
Subject: Ultrasound and PAS-16 at the same time?
To: Ultrasound Daily Digest <ultrasound@dsd.es.com>
Has anyone gotten their GUS to co-exist with a PAS-16 in the machine
at the same time? I can get it to work partially, but no programs
will auto-detect the SB portion of the PAS-16. If a program will aloow
you to force it on it works fine, but most abort saying that there is no
SoundBlaster present.
Please let me know if there is another solution. I even tried not loading
the drivers on one or the other card but they still won't work together.
I really don't want to give up my PAS (or my new GUS either!)
Also, does anyone know of any programming info that is available for the GUS?
