Ultrasound Daily Digest Wed, 30 Dec 92 Volume 1 : Issue 62 Today's Topics: A few questions from a new owner DMA Channels -- 1 or 2? DUNE2 GUS and Quest for Glory III Patches Questions that I can't answer Ultrasound Daily Digest V1 #61 Voice Recognition for GUS? Volume Control well... Information about the UltraSound Daily Digest (such as mail addresses, request servers, ftp sites, etc., etc.) can be found at the end of the Digest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 07:47:22 PST From: "Burns Fisher, VMS DECwindows 29-Dec-1992 1027" Message-Id: <9212291547.AA29158@enet-gw.pa.dec.com> Subject: A few questions from a new owner To: Ultrasound Daily Digest >From: "Bryon Daly, ECE Dept, UMass, Amherst" >Well, I just got my GUS a few days back, finally, and I have a few questions >for you guys...(Hopefully this will get posted, since my last letter to the >digest never made it...) It was posted ok...at least I got it. I am a new GUS owner too, but I have been fooling with MIDI for a couple years, so I think I can help. >Am I missing something? Can someone please tell me how I can generically >lower the output volume on the card...or at least in Starcon2 and Windows? I don't think you are missing anything. Go to your friendly local Radio Shack and get an in-line headphone volume control. It has a mini stereo jack on one end and plug on the other with a volume control in the middle. Works fine for me! Around $4.00. >Second, can someone take the time to explain the basics of midi (.mid) files? >What exactly are they and how do they work? They are basically a list of instructions of the form: At time 574 on channel 1, start playing note 46 at volume level 93 At time 580 on channel 2, start playing note 93 at volume level 60 At time 623 on channel 1, turn off note 46 At time 700 on channel 3, change instrument (usually called patch) to number 48 This is all in a standard format, and there is more info as well (like speed, time signature, and special synthesizer-specific commands called sysex). In addition, there is an electrical format also called MIDI. In fact that was first. It has roughly the same commands except it is missing the "at time ..." since the synth is supposed to do it as soon as it receives the command. Note that the "instrument" to change to is a number. Herein used to lie the biggest problem in MIDI: If you have a MIDI rendition of a song for which you want a particular instrumentation, you used to need to change the instrument numbers for each specific synth you were going to use. Now we have a standard called "General MIDI" which specifies (among other things) which instrument number is which. >Can someone also explain how >to get them to be played by my GUS...what steps to take, etc? Right now, >playmidi will ONLY play the examples included with the card. I can't get >any of the .mid files from epas to work. All the ones I've tried, such as >magical.mid, demo0001.mid, and canyon.mid all give an error like "unable >to load achbells - 7" or something like that. Under Windows, Media Player >will load in a midi file, but it always gives the warning that "it may not >play right under the current midi configuration", and it never sounds too >good. You need more GUS memory. That is what the "load" error means. From what I have read on this list, the Media Player does not have some particular system call built into it which loads a patch (i.e the info needed to play a particular instrument) into the GUS. Thus when you use it, you just get default instruments rather than the correct ones. playmidi does it right, but you run out of memory. >I have the Ultrasound driver installed, and moved that file they wanted >into the \windows\system dir. In the midi setup, I have "ultrasound" selected >in both columns of that mysterious chart (What's that all about?). >The manual is virtually worthless about this stuff...can someone tell me what >I need to do? Thanks! The Windows manual is a bit better, but not much. Essentially, Windows assumes that all MIDI files you play will be expecting General MIDI patches. The MIDI Mapper allows you to map between the GM patches requested by the midi files and the actual patches used by the synth you have. Since the GUS does GM on its own, you don't have to do any weird mapping. Just have all 16 channels enabled under setup. You don't need to select Ultrasound under that patch map column. None is fine, since you don't need any mapping. Of course all this is rather moot since the Media player does not load the patches anyway. >Third, after playing Star Control II, I loaded up Windows, and the card >flipped out! It played the opening tune and then continued to play random >noise mixed in with snippets of Starcon2 (all at HIGH VOLUME) until I exited >Windows. SBOS was NOT installed. Does starcon2 screw the card up for >other apps? Using the card under DOS and then starting windows seems to do this frequently. I made an alias for windows and did "ultrinit" before running windows. It seems to usually work, but not always. Quite annoying. Burns ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 12:07:02 -0500 From: "It's your hand, Buckaroo" Message-Id: <9212291707.AA00607@magick.tay2.dec.com> Subject: DMA Channels -- 1 or 2? To: Ultrasound Daily Digest > In the ULTRASND variable: > > ULTRASND=220,*,*,11,5 > > ...the DMA channels are the asterisks, so it is possible to > set them to be two different channels, right? > > Then how come the Windows stuff only allows for one? The GUS requires a send DMA channel and a receive DMA channel (as far as I understand it) and they are usually the same. Since the GUS isn't a bus mastering DMA device, the CPU has to get involved in any DMA transfers to/from the card, so I don't think there would be any benefit to having separate channels. As for Windows, the Ultrasound driver determines what info is asked for by those dialog boxes so the driver is enforcing the "same channel for both" scenario. DDA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 05:25:42 -0800 From: He who shall be king Message-Id: <199212291325.AA00802@halcyon.com> Subject: DUNE2 To: Ultrasound Daily Digest for the person who was wondering about DUNE2.. I've been using the card no problem with it... and unlike some of the other games, the SB emulation actually sounds better than the SB.. well it looks like the daughter board will be out very soon, wow 48KHz eh?.. kinda makes me sorry I jumped the gun and bought a turtle beach a while back... PATCH INFO! Is anyone working on a patch editor for this beast? The thought of incorporating up to a meg of PCM wavedata is making my mouth water... and how is the looping? and what is the multi-sample capability? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I want to change it all... I want to change.. Brad Faith ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 22:05:22 pst From: Thomas Wang Message-Id: <9212300605.AA29099@hpdmsjlm.cup.hp.com> Subject: GUS and Quest for Glory III To: Ultrasound Daily Digest I am having some problem with digitized speech in this game. My GUS's set up is DMA 6, MIDI 7, Ultra IRQ 11. Whenever there is speech about to be spoken, the animation sequence stops. If I set the program to 'no speech', then everything is fine. SBOS emmulation of adlib sound is fine. I wonder if the game is looking for the wrong sound blaster IRQ? I have SBOS 1.23 beta. -Thomas Wang (Everything is an object.) wang@cup.hp.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 03:10:18 -0500 From: Markus Ngus Message-Id: <92Dec28.031020est.246319-2@descartes.uwaterloo.ca> Subject: Patches To: Ultrasound Daily Digest So anyone with news on the =*= New =*= Patches that are being compiled? I'm getting sick of the old buggy ones. same goes for the windows drivers ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 08:08:02 PST From: "Burns Fisher, VMS DECwindows 29-Dec-1992 1056" Message-Id: <9212291608.AA00737@enet-gw.pa.dec.com> Subject: Questions that I can't answer To: Ultrasound Daily Digest Well, I just answered some questions from a new user, but I am also a new user and have some questions that I CAN'T answer. Can someone else? 1) Ok, so the media player does not load patches. Will it ever? How does this eventually get fixed? 2) For playmidi, you apparently need to have a patch change command in the MIDI file in order for it to load a patch, even from the default list. Is there a way to convince it to use a set of default patches for each channel? (Is that the -a and -g parameters? Not clear from the docs. Note: I know about the .cfg files. Those tell which patch number goes to what patch file. I want to assign default patches to each channel. 3) Earl Weaver Baseball II: I used the -o2 switch with SBOS 1.21 and 1.22. In both cases, I got the music just fine until the first digitized voice yelling "Out!". This voice came over the speaker and after that, I got no more music at all. In fact nothing on the GUS...only the voice on the PC speaker. Anyone get this to work? 4) Yeah, I got the bizzare stuff when switching from DOS to windows too, even after removing SBOS and running ultrinit. Not always, mind you, but sometimes. Does Gravis know about this problem? I would think some init code in the windows driver would fix it. Thanks, Burns ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 12:28:00 EST From: moddan@bowker.com (Daniel Nicholson ) Message-Id: Subject: Ultrasound Daily Digest V1 #61 To: Ultrasound Daily Digest I'd just like to confirm that Star Control II works much better (ie, much less slowdown) with the GUS in a slow machine. We were playing SC II with a GUS in a 12mhz 286 which crawled to a stop with an SB Pro. This is proof of how much better it is to have the sound card do the work! - Dan Nicholson ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 92 13:03:05 -0700 From: Marc Clarke Message-Id: <9212292003.AA20987@hpfimic.fc.hp.com> Subject: Voice Recognition for GUS? To: Ultrasound Daily Digest Fellow GUS Enthusiasts; I have recently been looking at the specifications for the Microsoft sound card and the Covox Voice Master II. Both of these cards offer to capability to do digital recording, as does the GUS. However, each of these two cards also offers the capability to do limited voice recognition. The Covox card can trigger up to 1023 DOS macro commands. The MS card is billed as being able to trigger MS Windows events. Has anyone at Gravis or elsewhere discussed the possibility of doing voice recognition with the GUS? ------------------------- ' Marc Illsley Clarke Member of the Technical Staff Integrated Circuits Business Division Post H2, Mail Stop 72, Building 2-Upper, Fort Collins Facility Hewlett-Packard Company, 3404 East Harmony Road Fort Collins, Colorado 80525-9599 USA HP-TELNET: 1-229-3376 BELL: (303)-229-3376 FAX: (303)-229-6580 Internet: mic@hpfimic.fc.hp.com "The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 23:29:22 -0700 (MST) From: michael a finkel Message-Id: Subject: Volume Control To: Ultrasound Daily Digest Is there any graceful way to control the volume on the seemingly always full volume amp-out port? I have some decent size speakers hooked up directly to it and it is painful to listen to for long periods of time. I have considered putting a potentiometer in the line, but that reduces speaker sound quality and responsiveness (making it a not very attractive option). I have also contemplated buying an amp/mixer to control the volume - expensive. Gravis really ought to consider some sort of volume control in their drivers/hardware (and offer such a hardware upgrade to existing owners free of charge because it is such an inconvenience). Please speak up if you have similar feelings or possible solutions and maybe we will be heard. Thanks --------->Mike Finkel<------------->Mfinkel@gas.uug.arizona.edu<-------------- ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 00:07:36 -0800 From: He who shall be king Message-Id: <199212300807.AA19492@halcyon.com> Subject: well... To: Ultrasound Daily Digest 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) do I have to mess with the midi mapper? ...help -------------------------------------------------------------------- Brad Faith ------------------------------ End of Ultrasound Daily Digest V1 #62 ******************************