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New Gravis Ultrasound forums...


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A while back I started building a site dedicated to the Gravis Ultrasound. Recently I added forums to the site, and although the forum index page gets a lot of hits, no one seems to sign up or anything, which I think is because the place looks so dead. I don't know if there is anyone here who ever had a GUS or was into DOS gaming in general, but I think if I could get a few people to sign up over there and participate a little bit, the place might take off somewhat. My site gets a pretty decent amount of traffic coming in from Google, but most people just download the files that they need and then take off.

 

Anyway, please check it out and become a member if you're interested.

 

http://www.gravisultrasound.com/forums/index.php

 

Thanks!

 

Chris

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Didn't have one back in the day, but a friend of mine had a gravis ace. But if i recall correct it wasn't supported as wide as the soundblaster awe cards. Love those days of add-on cards. Still have good memories of my voodoo2 12mb graphics card.

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That was actually the Ultrasound's downfall. Although it emulated the Sound Blaster, it could not emulate the SB16 or anything after that. Gravis banked on game companies adding native Ultrasound support to their games, and it just didn't happen en masse. The games that do support it sound great, but most people were happy enough with their Sound Blasters, inferior though they may have been. I think it just cost too much money to really take advantage of what the GUS could do, especially in terms of music. They would have to hire someone to score MIDI soundtracks for their games to take advantage of its wavetable, etc.

 

Chris

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Think the same thing is happening right now, since all motherboards come with onboard soundcards, fewer and fewer people start to buy deticated soundcards. I know use the onboard soundcard because i had to cut costs on my new pc. But i will be buying a dedicated soundcard later this year or start next year. But only if it really can boost my pc performance, since onboard soundcards use cpu resources.

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I think it just cost too much money to really take advantage of what the GUS could do, especially in terms of music. They would have to hire someone to score MIDI soundtracks for their games to take advantage of its wavetable, etc.

Well, I think a lot of companies actually did just that. Write nice music for the Roland MT-32 or General MIDI, then write some driver that can read the same music and reformat it (in a much lower quality) for a Sound Blaster or Adlib card.

 

since all motherboards come with onboard soundcards, fewer and fewer people start to buy deticated soundcards.

These days I don't think it makes a big difference. Back then, there was a wide array of cards with different features and different price points, and you kind of had to do your homework to figure out what was worth spending your money on. These days, I think most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a top of the line Sound Blaster and the old AC'97 that motherboards used to use. The X-Fi cards have some nice features, but even most gamers probably don't use most of them.

 

--Zero

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These days I don't think it makes a big difference. Back then, there was a wide array of cards with different features and different price points, and you kind of had to do your homework to figure out what was worth spending your money on. These days, I think most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a top of the line Sound Blaster and the old AC'97 that motherboards used to use. The X-Fi cards have some nice features, but even most gamers probably don't use most of them.

 

--Zero

 

Yeah, the big thing these days with gamers is the fact OpenAL deprecated support for Creative's EAX. For modern games, this rendered Creative's advantage moot as now any decent DSP could perform this if I'm correct.

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Dont forget there are alot of spam bots out there that could be hitting your site and not getting through to the next level.

 

Old DOS sounds in games were great - though always a challenge to get the correct memsys settings in config.sys right!

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