Subject: 16-bit daughter card: Often asked, never answered
I spoke with Chris Yuzik of Gravis Marketing the other day (9
December), and I asked him about the 16-bit daughter card. He was
non-committal, of course, but he did say that it *WILL* come out,
thank goodness ;-). He also unfortunately said that it won't be
avaiable before Christmas. So sometime in the New Year we can look
forward to the 16-bit card.
IN SUMMARY: The 16-bit daughter will come out after the first of the
year. The exact date is still to be determined.
--
Stuart Yoshida
Internet: yoshida@elektra.fc.hp.com
Voice: (303) 229-2324
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 10:40:10 EST
From: davidm@marcam.com (David MacMahon)
Subject: Re: 16-bit DMAs
>Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 13:03:53 -0200 (GMT-2:00)
>From: sn@phoenix.oulu.fi (Sami Nieminen)
>Subject: 16-bit DMAs ?
>
> Following thing caught my attention when browsing through the Ultrasound
>README-file. When they told about those faulty OPTI chipsets, they said
>that DMAs 0-3 are 8-bit, the rest are 16-bit.
> Ofcourse I checked whether my motherboard was faulty. No errors, I could
>notice no difference of any kind between 8-/16-bit DMAs. This baffled me.
>What's the difference ? They implied that using 8-bit DMA is something you can
>barely live with, but actually the default DMA for GUS is 8-bit. So I'd be
>curious to know if there's any use to set your GUS to use other than the
>default DMA, and what that use could be.
With 8-bit DMA channels, one byte of data is transferred per DMA cycle.
With 16-bit DMA channels, two bytes of data are transferred per DMA cycle.
This means that transferring data to/from the GUS on a 16-bit DMA channel
uses half as many bus cycles as transferring the same data on an 8-bit
channel. It therefore takes half as long to tranfer data via a 16-bit DMA
channel as it does over an eight bit DMA channel. This is helpful for
several reasons.
1) Patches are able to be loaded in half the time (this especially helps
patch caching applications).
2) When recording to disk, a 16-bit DMA transfer is using half as many bus
cycles as an 8-bit DMA transfer would. This leaves more bus cycles for the
disk controller.
3) When using a program that does simultaneous recording and playback and
writing to disk, such as my program GusDelay (sorry for the balatant plug
:-)), bus cycles are very precious indeed. Using two different 16-bit DMA
channels greatly improves the throughput of such programs.
These advantages are only performance advantages, not feature advantages.
IOW, everything that can be done with a 16-bit channel can be done with an
8-bit DMA channel, it just takes longer.
There may be other advantages that I'm forgetting now. Can anybody think of
more?
Dave
David MacMahon
Software Engineer
davidm@marcam.com
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 06:02:07 -0500
From: "Mark C. Ng" <mcng@undergrad.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: 16 bit recording add on board...
Anyone in high tower of GRAVIS:
Becuase of the non-existance of the announcement of the 16 bit rec. add
on I suppose WE CAN ALL forget about the product being released before
Christmas and New Years?!?!! John?? Chris? anyone?
What are you guys working on?
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 12:17:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Phat H Tran <ptran@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Answers
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 13:03:53 -0200 (GMT-2:00)
> From: sn@phoenix.oulu.fi (Sami Nieminen)
> Subject: 16-bit DMAs ?
>
> Ofcourse I checked whether my motherboard was faulty. No errors, I could
> notice no difference of any kind between 8-/16-bit DMAs. This baffled me.
> What's the difference ? They implied that using 8-bit DMA is something you can
There is really no difference between using a 16-bit DMA and an 8-bit DMA
for your GUS. The only thing that the DMA affects is the speed with
which samples are transferred to the GUS, but even with 8-bit, the transfer
is already faster than the disk seeks. Since the sample DMA transfer isn't
the bottle neck, going to a 16-bit channel won't speed anything up noticeably.
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 93 11:50:53 -0800
> From: fredh@hpcvusd.cv.hp.com
> Subject: click prevention
>
> Is there a tool available to check the DRAM on the GUS ? I've been
> having some clicks that I can hear when wearing headphones. They
> hurt my ear. It is only in the left channel. Does this indicate
> anything? Since I'm using the patches that came with the GUS
> I assume they were done with good samples, good loop points and
> good voice handling routines. I like the GUS a lot but the
> clicks I'm getting are terrible. I'm using Power Chords to produce
> the music that has the clicks.
Sound's like you're experiencing clipping since the "clicking" is loud
enough to hurt your ears. Clipping occurs when the voices are played
too loudly together, causing the output to crackle somewhat. Turn down
the MIDI volume using the mixer slightly and the crackles should
disappear.
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 20:28:14 -0800
> From: jakub@eskimo.com (Jake Cholewczynski)
> Subject: Re: GUS Daily Digest V9 #11
>
> DOOM? Personally I tried it and GUS sounds like a SB or SBOS ver. 1.2 the sound
> is not clean must have been recorded at really poor quality, the game looks great slow on a 386 but cool but sound is not anything like SCII or Epic's Pinball
Umm... I don't think your were getting proper GUS sounds from the game.
DOOM 1.0 requires that you fetch a missing file and set your IRQs < 9
before it will support the GUS correctly.
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 16:52:16 -0500
> From: <Ken@oti.on.ca>
> Subject: Need Syndicate SBOS parameters
>
> I, and four others at our company, have recently purchased
> GUS'. One game that I've been playing using my SBPro but
> can't get to work with my GUS is Syndicate. If anyone's had
> any success, please post the parameters. Thanks,
Syndicate requires that your soundcard be at port 220h, and
that the IRQ be 7. If you change the IRQ to something else,
then start the game by typing main.exe /iirq<IRQ>. You can't
