GUS Daily Digest Sun, 26 Feb 95 9:37 PST Volume 19: Issue 26 Today's Topics: 7TH Guest and GUS Cut the chatter... Dark Forces, Full Throttle, Ultrasound Experience Descent - a fix, maybe ...... GUS Software Probs Not So Bad How to get MKII to work Internet Phone Magic Carpet MAXSBOS .21???? Okay.. more memory is important.. Warp drivers.... Whats New? Win95 + GUS Drivers - GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!! Standard Info: - Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest. - Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 15:18:05 -0500 (EST) From: Hal Black Subject: 7TH Guest and GUS Hi. I can't get digital sounds from the Seventh Guest with my GUS MAX. I have t7gfix3.zip, which has a lot of drivers for different sound cards. Can someone tell me the EXACT instructions for what to do to get it to work with the GUS (MAX)? The music sounds great, though... Good news is, I got my ram upgrade, and now I have a full meg. My advice to MAX or new GUS users (the ones that come with 512K ram) Call gravis and get the number for 9600 Baud, which is a company that has competitive prices on the chip you need, and it WORKS. Before I did this, I ordered from somewhere else, and the chip didn't work, and I had to go through lots of hassle. It's ~$40 for the chip, and well worth it! Hal ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 95 16:02:30 EST From: Bryan Maher Subject: Cut the chatter... > > Will either Microsoft or Gravis get their act together for the soundcard > "Gravis Ultrasound" !! > > If they don't I can't honestly see the ultrasound being around on the > market place for very much longer !! As a member of Team OS/2 I am sick and tired of hearing the ignorant comment that IBM doesn't support something and Microsoft does... Let's set the record straight. Microsoft does not support anything other than the AT specification. It is up to the hardware manufacturers to make hardware and drivers that adhere to certain standard API's so that their product will work with Windows or OS/2 or whatever. Additionally, as a developer I am so very tired of hearing people complain about support not being available for Win95. Microsoft has changed the API specification 3 times in the last year. It would be a waste of a company's time and money to develop for an unsupported platform. Gravis has many months until the final product comes out and it is in their best interest to wait until the final API specifications and the latest SDK's become available for use. This frees up their time for refining the existing software. I personally feel Win95 will be highly flawed in its first version ( Microsoft's own first version track record supports this...) and it is in most people's best interest to wait at least until the first revision comes out. Give Gravis a break. They will come through. Bryan Maher > and tell them that if they don't support the card you'll be throwing it a > way and buying a Creative Labs sound card instead!!! P.S. YOU can go buy a SoundBlaster anytime you want. I'll stick with my G-MAX. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 22:23:18 -0800 (PST) From: Stanley Kwong Subject: Dark Forces, Full Throttle, Ultrasound Experience The guy who posted that the Dark Forces demo works with maxsbos with the \c \x switches was right. The sound effects do work beautifully. There's no music but the music's not that great anyway. Also, the Full Throttle demo works flawlessly. And since the soundtrak isn't midi, it works just like it does in my store. And to those who were inquiring about the price of the Ultrasound Experience, the price is $4.99. If you send me a check I'll mail it to you but I can't do that until next month, after finals are over. BTW, if you do send me a check, send it to me in one of those envelopes that are made for shipping disks. That way the CD won't get crushed when I send it to you. Stan Kwong ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 95 17:46:44 GMT From: ljb@spclmway.demon.co.uk (Lewis Berrie) Subject: Descent - a fix, maybe ...... I spent last night playing with the HMI drivers for Descent. I tried other HMI drivers from other games, but none improved the noise. I then attacked the DESCENTG.INI file. I tried commenting-out some patches (one's near the end) and it seemed to improve a bit ... not really much good. Then I played with the settings at the beginning of the file ... and got some success !!! What I altered was the sampling rate of the patches for the 1 Meg card, 'cos that is what I have got. Normally the line is this :- O 1024 8 22 meaning on 1 Meg cards, load the patches in 8 bit and at 22 khz. I upped the frequency to the normal 44 khz, and wham, most of the noise was gone !!! It only loaded 64 of the 67 patches (since some of the patches doubled in size), but the ones missed are hardly ever used (according to the DESCENTG.INI file). There was still some noise in the percussion of the intro music, but other music was vastly improved. I then tried 16-bit instead of 8-bit, but this did not improve matters anymore. Only about 35 patches were loaded this time, but the music still sounded fine. Please could some other people try this fix to see if improves the sound on their cards (even on 512k cards, 'cos the music still should sound fine). I checked the readme files that came with the patch update for DESCENT, and it said they had reduced the patches to 8-bit 22khz on >512k cards to help stop a LOADPATS lockup. It did not lockup on me once after I had reverted the patches back to 44khz, nor even when they where at 16-bit. Hope this is of some use. Lew :-) P.s. Could the noise be due to aliasing problems when reducing the sampling frequency ??? I always thought you could not half the frequency of a sample without passing it through a [digital] low-pass filter in case it contained frequencies above the Nyquist frequency of the new sampling rate (normally half the sampling rate is the Nyquist frequency). If it did contain too high frequencies, then aliasing would occur (lots of weird, un-wanted noise when the high-frequencies get "mapped" down into the lower frequency band). Do the HMI drivers, or the LOADPATS program, perform such signal processing to the patches when they are loaded at a lower frequency to save memory ??? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 24 Feb 95 9:15:19 EST From: "Brian K. Dowtin" Subject: GUS Software Probs Not So Bad >Everytime a new release of the install-disks is out there is ALWAYS something > not working ( now for the 3.59 for example its just clear they even didnt >try to install it on a single machine and see if the gus was functioning). > > They announce something ( read Megaem protected mode ) and after 2 months > none has seen even the beta. > > We just cannot let everything go this shameful way. > > If the situations keeps this way i am going to sell this card. > Alessio. Alessio, Easy now... Gravis is just like any other company that writes software. Its not a trivial thing to produce perfect code (that runs on N! variations of machines and configurations). Nor is it a trivial thing to estimate the time to write a piece of software. I'm thankful that they are so responsive. I've personally gotten at least 4 of the software updates (GUS000xx) free. This shows 1. They are trying to improve the software. 2. Addressing user problems and concerns. 3. Not out to screw their customers. Look at the software industry - Chicago - was Windows94 (Ha!) - then it was supposed to be out 1st Quarter 95, now its 2nd or 3rd... Look at DOS 6.0 - there have been two upgrades since it came out and for most folks they were about $10.00 a piece. (-free to download though) All I am trying to say, is that I can think of many companys who, if in Gravis' shoes would have offered less support and charged more for it. `Brian -- #### If you want to be on the cutting edge - be prepared to bleed a little. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 95 18:41:27 MST From: dchow@stu.athabascau.ca (Donald Chow) Subject: How to get MKII to work Okay, for the guy with QEMM problems with MKII, as it says in the manual you should load any memory managers. A clean boot, or just XMS will do. As for the gravis gamepad, run 'ultrajoy 31' before loading the game (editing mk2gus.bat is a quick shortcut). Make sure the switch on the _bottom_ of the pad is pushed to the _right_ which enables 4 buttons. P.S. The top switch os for switching to leftie play.. Don -- Donald Chow dchow@a.stu.athabascau.ca bf298@freenet.carleton.ca : F u s i o n - Grafk Design: GATB and X-Phile : I was put on this Earth for a number of reasons, right now, I'm so far behind, I'll live forever. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 17:17:35 -0500 (EST) From: David Ross Subject: Internet Phone Has anyone gotten the Internet Phone program to work properly under WFWG 3.11 with a GUS? I set it up on a friends machine, and it works fine, but on mine with the GUS, the speech (coming off the net) gets screwed up. (Like someone pressing the mute button of a TV on and off every 2 seconds or so) Also, it crashes _very_ frequently during "conversations." I put that in quotes because it's impossible to tell what people are saying. :) Transmission of my recorded voice seems to work fine though. (My friend is down the hall in my dorm, and we both are on the net directly) Any help would be greatly appreceated. Thanks! David Ross snakey@cs.umd.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 00:58:40 +0200 (EET) From: Saari Anssi Subject: Re: Magic Carpet >Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 11:39:37 -0800 >From: "Dale Newcomb, Jr." >Subject: Re: Magic Carpet >Anyone else know what I need to do to >get the demo version to work with the GUS? I don't even care if it's >crappy SBOS - just want to hear something! Well, it works for me with Maxsbos, but GUS owners would only get the music. Anssi ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 16:26:27 -0500 From: arg2@po.cwru.edu (Adam Glick) Subject: MAXSBOS .21???? wherer can i find maxsbos alpha .21 all i can find on epas. is vert .1 alpha and i was wondering were the ver everyone talks about is. thanmks -Adam arg2@po.cwru.edu 'A person who believes one thing will solve all their problems is a fool : they're twice the fool if they believe the thing that will fix their problems is money' ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 21:16:20 -0800 (PST) From: Dave Woldrich Subject: Okay.. more memory is important.. Hello, I'm not a big shooter when it comes to the GUS, but I think that a question needs to be raised about the new and improved GUS/AMD Interwave that was mentioned on this list: What do we, the consumers, want to see in the amount of base RAM that will be shipped as standard on the next GUS? "next GUS" meaning the next generation GUS compatible card that will be able to address more than 1 meg of RAM. Considerations: Cost of RAM, larger MIDI patch sizes, Sounds in games, (other?!) I would like to organize some sort of informal poll among folks on this list. If you would like to have some say, please mail me with the amount of RAM you would like to see shipped as standard on every new GUS. This might make design and cost issues inside Gravis easier if we let them know how we feel now. Anyhow, I'm assuming that the next GUS will be able to use SIMM modules instead of DRAMs, so you'll probably need to base your vote on available SIMM module sizes out there... My address is davew@uofport.edu Mail me before February 29. I will tally your votes and post them to the GUS general mail server on the next day. I will repost this message a few times so everyone gets a look at it. PLEASE DO NOT POST A VOTE TO THE MAIL SERVER -- that is clutter and clutter is *LAME*! Don't be a lamer. :) I have not gotten an overwhelming response yet, so feel free to write me if you haven't... David Woldrich (davew@wally.uofport.edu) | Majoring in Computer Science --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Uh ... d'they do that with LASERS?!?!" -Dave Letterman ^^^^^^ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 21:45:05 -0500 (EST) From: Buddy Subject: Warp drivers.... I have a simple question and I hope to get a simple answer. I am about to install Warp on my machine. I have used the Ultrasound in Windows for over two years and I have an external keyboard hooked up to my card. I want to be able to play the Ultrasound and record midi tracks under OS/2. Since I don't have any midi software that runs under OS/2 natively (does it exist?) I will obviously be doing it under Windows within OS/2. I understand that the Manley drivers and the Gravis drivers will both give me .wav playback under OS/2. My question is this.... Which drivers should I use to allow midi recording using my keyboard? Thanks for your help.... Kevin ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 95 23:01:06 EST From: Meshreki@eecis.udel.edu Subject: Whats New? Message-ID: <9502260401.aa02917@stimpy.eecis.udel.edu> A couple of people might be interested in my "log" of the new Gravis releases as I found them on archive.epas.utoronto.ca. At the very least, you can find out if its worth it to you to download the latest install disk or patch. Send any comments or corrections to meshreki@ee.udel.edu Sam --- /// GUS0046.ZIP /// DOS MAXSBOS v0.21 beta /// GUS0045.ZIP /// DOS UltrINIT v2.31 Supports ULTRAMIX.INI DOS MIXER Supports ULTRAMIX.INI /// GUS0044.ZIP /// DOS SETUP v0.10 alpha Combines SETUP & SetGUS. /// GUS359x.ZIP (x = A,B,C,D,E,F) /// DOS UltrINIT v2.29 DOS PlayFILE v4.50 DOS SETUP v5.03do DOS SetGUS v2.50 DOS PARSE v3.59 DOS WPARSE v1.20 Windows GRVSULTR.386 v5.48 Windows ULTRASND.DRV v5.48 Windows ULTMPORT.DRV v1.02 Windows Patchmaker v1.62 Windows MIXER v5.32 MIDI Patches All have patch names inside patches! /// GUS0043.ZIP /// DOS PlayMIDI v5.12 DOS PlayFILE v4.40 DOS UltraMIX v1.03 DOS UltrINIT v2.25 DOS UltraMID v1.12 /// GUS042.ZIP /// Windows Patch Manager v1.56 Fixed some Bank Manager bugs Windows GRVSULTR.386 v5.34 \ Windows ULTRASND.DRV v5.34 - Fixed shell & .WAV bugs, increased max DMA to 8K Windows ULTMPORT.DRV v1.01 / /// GUS353x.ZIP (x = A,B,C,D,E,F) /// DOS GravUTIL v3.0 DOS PlayMIDI v5.06 Can use external ULTLOGO.BMP, fixed initial delay bug DOS PlayFILE v3.8 MAX/DB support DOS SBOS v3.82 DOS UltraMID v1.11 DOS UltraJOY v?.?? DOS Ultrinit v2.23 Added -s "silent" mode DOS E.BAT v1.0 - front-end for emulators (SBOS,MegaEM,UltraMID) DOS GUSEMU v1.0 / Windows Mixer v2.02 Added volume percentages Windows Patch Maker Litev1.13 Added increased envelope precision Windows Patch Manager v1.55 Added Bank Manager -- MAJOR UPGRADE! Windows GRVSULTR.386 v5.21 \ Windows ULTRASND.DRV v5.21 - Added DMA Buffer sizes, MAX/DB support Windows ULTMPORT.DRV v1.01 / Windows ULTRAHLP.HLP v?.?? Windows ULTRASND.INI v?.?? Added Patch Bank Names General MIDI patches v?.?? New file dates, some patches improved? BUGS: * Windows drivers -- fixed in GUS042.ZIP - garbled .WAV on old GUS (and GUS MAX?) - incompatible with any 3rd party shell (NDW,PC Tools) * Bank Manager - copying perc bank to bank 0 doesn't work -- fixed GUS042 - creating new perc bank w/ copy current doesn't work * SBOS.CFG still has SEIRRA typo (should be SIERRA) * File dates -- if any existing file is dated newer than intended replacement file on 3.53 install disks, it will NOT get replaced. (example: replacement SBOSLIB.SBS is dated 1/2/80 on install disks!) Delete specific original files and do manual (file) install or delete everything and do a fresh install. (BACKUP any important stuff 1st!) * General MIDI Patches -- still don't have names inside patches * GV v1.7 -- Gravis (readme) Viewer skips/blanks lines occasionally ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 16:47:42 -0500 From: joe@ping.ping.com (Joakim Erdfelt) Subject: Re: Win95 + GUS Drivers - GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!! >Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 10:18:05 GMT >From: "Mark.Carline BSc Elec Eng." > >Will either Microsoft or Gravis get their act together for the soundcard >"Gravis Ultrasound" !! >and tell them that if they don't support the card you'll be throwing it a >way and buying a Creative Labs sound card instead!!! >Mark.Carline@unn.ac.uk Well .... Creation and maintaining of Sound Card drivers is not Microsoft's responsibility. It is Advanced Gravis's responsibility. Microsoft could care less if you make threats like that. They dont care. They have NOTHING to do with the creation of these drivers. Just give Gravis their fair share of time to create them. I mean Windows 9x is still in A BETA TESTING mode right now. When Windows 9x has been out and in the populace for 2 months and Advanced Gravis STILL HASN'T released their drivers, THEN you can complain. But as for now I'm content with simply going through the BETA TESTING motions with Microsoft themselves. -Joe -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Dear Earthling : Hello! I am a creature from a galaxy far away, vacationing on your planet. I have transformed myself into this little .sig . As you are reading it, I am having sex with your eyeballs. I know you like it, because you are smiling. Thanks for a wonderful time. ------------------------------ End of GUS Daily Digest V19 #26 *******************************