During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison is Sound Blaster's MIDI and the "PC squeaker") lasted only a few months because the card fried a capacitor or something like that, and that was it. That was decades ago and I still think about it not unlike a friend I left behind that I can no longer reach back to, to be perfectly honest. I had the dead-weight on my shelf, that's the last I remember. I was young and probably didn't even think of handing it to an electronics shop for a relatively cheap repair -- a fried capacitor or loose PCB connection is not a fried custom processor, I imagine.
Anyway, good memories, even in the tragedy. I can relate to people who resurrect GUS.
Since others mention similar failings of their card, I remember I too had it installed horisontally in a (Chinese/Taiwanese) mini-tower, it definitely wasn't a desktop chassis, much less an IBM PC. I guess gravity strained it to a breaking point.
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.
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/
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.
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.
I think the main problem will be sourcing one of the AMD InterWave chips. Those are (to my knowledge) not produced anymore and the only source would be another GUS card
> 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?
” 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”?
For me, one of the saddest side-effects of modern generative AI is this apparent rise in an attitude of “I don’t know how to do this, therefore anyone who does this must have just one-shotted it with AI”.
Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.
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).
That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?
This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.
At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.
Anyway, good memories, even in the tragedy. I can relate to people who resurrect GUS.
Since others mention similar failings of their card, I remember I too had it installed horisontally in a (Chinese/Taiwanese) mini-tower, it definitely wasn't a desktop chassis, much less an IBM PC. I guess gravity strained it to a breaking point.
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.
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
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
Edit: The fact that quite a few games supported the GUS out of the box or received patches to do so was also a well received boon on my side.
...it's a breakout board for an OOP chip that's impossible to find?
You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.
Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.
If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.
Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.
At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.