Gravis Ultrasound MAX, interesting stuff?

[timofonic]

Hello,

I will have very soon a Gravis Ultrasound MAX, it's old ISA thingie, but it has quite interesting stuff because demoscene liked it a lot. It has retro stuff like emulation of MT32, SC55, CM32/64L... Anyone knows how that emulation is really? It can be really interesting for doing music with retro sounds? I want it for doing music with old school sounds and using it as subtitute of original synths for vintage computers (MSX for Illusion City, X68000...).

What other retro audio cards are interesting too? Any manner of using old ISA audio cards on new computers?

[Jidis]

I'm trying to stay away from ISA cards these days, but I've never had any with unique "voices". A few years back, when I still had a bunch of SCSI junk around, I used to try to use it in thrown together PC's. I had ISA cards which were supposed to do "fast-narrow" SCSI or something around 5-10M/s. Well, they got around 1M, and I did some research. It turns out that the modern PCI to ISA bridge in most stuff past 286/386's or something pretty much sucks. I'm not sure if anything's changed, but they don't go much further than PII era anyway. I guess they figured it was good enough to connect to "legacy" hardware until we could upgrade it. Hard disk benchmarks also showed a ridiculous amount of processor load using the ISA on the stuff I tried.

I don't know if it hogs a machine like that for non-disk, lower bandwidth connections. These days I'm afraid to even use it for NIC cards. I do admit, I still like the old "foot long" SB16's with the CD/HD controller on them. The amps on those things could probably drive a small home stereo. 

Something to consider I guess. ???

                                                                        Take Care

George

[timofonic]

A friend said me that up to Intel 440 (Pentium II - Pentium III) it has DMA activated, but since Intel 810 it's only a map from PCI lossing a lot stuff from original ISA.

It's this true? Anyone can explain more about this? It seems interesting...

What about Gravis Ultrasound PnP and Gravis Ultrasound PRO? Anyone can provide info of them?

[Jidis]

A friend said me that up to Intel 440 (Pentium II - Pentium III) it has DMA activated, but since Intel 810 it's only a map from PCI lossing a lot stuff from original ISA.

I had a good document about SCSI card speeds, that I found on the web. It explained the whole deal with the new boards and ISA. I'll try to figure out where it came from.

It was indeed the result of some sloppy "glue" crap involved with the shell-type code they used to keep the ISA on there. They sounded like the only stuff that hit the true speeds were the really old boards, like maybe the ones with no PCI at all. The speed tests here were pathetic compared to the specs, but the CPU strain bothers me more. I still can't see why they figured that arrangement was acceptable, with all the "higher bandwidth" ISA cards people use, like drive controllers.

I've got two or three i440 boards here, but I can't remember if they were any of the ones I was trying to do fast or ultrawide SCSI on. I like most of them too. They used to cooperate exceptionally well with the notorious Lexicon Core2. I think the main host I wanted bootable fast narrow ISA SCSI on was some K6-2 board with one of those generic PCChips chipsets.

BTW- In the back of my head, I seem to think Thorsten mentioned having a Gravis something.

-George

PS- I'd be willing to bet I'm the first person to talk about "higher bandwidth ISA cards" in many years. I wonder if I win anything for that.

                                                                                                                                                                          ;D   

[moebius]

Well,

Wasn't Ultrawide around before the PCI.. You know: SCSI's not a x386 thinggy - it never was ;)

Try Apple or some "Workstation".. You might see some bandwidth on disk operations.

Disagree? Moebius

[Jidis]

Hey Moebius,

Yeah, it's old as the hills. ;)

Catch is, even back then there were fifty different flavors. UW was the one with the "ultra-fragile" 68 pin connectors, then you had everything from regular narrow, up into some "enhanced" 50 pin narrow formats (ultra SCSI or fast narrow?) which had actual 50 pin connectors on the cards (not the regular 25 sub).

It was *usually* Mac back then, but it seemed like a lot of big network systems must have used them, because there were fancy ISA's and PCI's all over the flea market scene. I've got a bunch. The Macs were why I had all the drives. When I started doing DAW multi-track, the whole IDE/SCSI thing was sort of reversed. The SCSI drives supposedly took care of a lot of their own transfer coordination, so the host machines could be free to handle that "massive load" from the four tracks of 44/16 audio. Internal Mac busses couldn't even do it. I think they just hit regular narrow speed, maybe 5M/sec (spec), and only a couple M/sec in real life. I had to run a UW Nubus card with giant 7200 rpm Seagates, which had the life expectancy of a house fly, and I still barely got over 10 or 12M/sec., and that wasn't even until right before Nubus was phased out. A couple years later there was hardly any point in them for what I was doing, and I never bothered with getting into the UW160 and all that faster new stuff.

The nice Adaptec ISA's I've got are obviously PC, and Windows can usually auto detect them. There's also some PCI's here by them and a few others, which are PC only (even the firmware). Some of the nicer Adaptec's were supposed to be able to get 10M/sec. and the fast-narrow,etc and UW could get 20 (according to them). The 20 or whatever may have only been for PCI, but I was told that the 154x's or whatever I was messing with could get 10M or something, but only on the "good" ISA bus. Like I said, I think i was getting under 2, with a good drive, and the CPU meter was way up over 60% (ouch!).

-George     

[timofonic]

It's interesting to know that about ISA bus :)

Anyone know about those cards and Pnp/PRO? it could be interesting to know stuff of them and software, patchsets, tools and hacks available for them :)

[Jidis]

It's interesting to know that about ISA bus :

Now we can all be afraid together. ;)

I don't know for certain that they all have that affect on a computer, but I guess none of us are really looking to slow our machines down any.

Like I said, I'll use the SB16's in stuff, and they still seem to move OK. I'll put old ISA NICs in machines that I'm setting up, just to move drivers and crap over to them from mine, and I'll leave them in there afterward. I'm assuming they don't do anything while they're idle.

-George

[Jidis]

Timofonic,

I managed to run across a rather old discussion about it on a hardware group. I think that "Ron" guy is one of the names I remember from the SCSI group.

http://tinyurl.com/9autl

Be prepared. It's long and they look like they might start cussing at each other after the first few posts.

Here's another where someone says that he thinks ISA SCSI is trouble, but not modems and soundcards. There's also mention of not using bus mastering on the ISA bus.

http://tinyurl.com/daxby

Take Care,

George

[cloudstrife]

Hi,

Interesting cards with special features might be:

- Soundblaster AWE32/SBpnp (EMU8000 Synthesizer with resonant 12dB filters and FX)

- old Ensoniq Soundscape (not the vivo thing) is an syn-engine, too

- Never had, but heard of some good things on ProAudioSpectrum 8/16 cards...

- Turtle Beach Maui... with Kurzweil chipset

- Roland SCC, RAP-10 and so on are GMIDI soundcards, some with filters and editable, others not

- Soundblaster 1 or 1.5 for the warm sounding FM-Synth (very cool with old games! the chipset is even easier to handle than the newer one suggested for midibox fm (and it sounds better, i think, more analogue) or Adlib Gold card (but they lack support)

- Yamaha DB-60SW or SW60 somehow, like the DB-50XG Board but as an ISA Soundcard (though the DB50XG is a cool thing too, especially the enhanced mode...)

- GUS cards do emulate just RAP and SCC in a simple GMIDI way, not the cool thing at all, but rather nice for old DOS Games, if you dont own the rare Rolands.

these are the most important isa's, i know.

anyhow, take alook at this:

http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc

greetinx, claudio

[seppoman]

Hi,

I own both an old Ultrasound and an Ultrasound PnP card. To be honest, I don´t see too much sense in hacking old soundcard chipsets like SoundCanvas or Yamaha XG series - If you want the sound of these boring preset ROMplers, there´s a load of different GM or XG compatible modules from Roland and Yamaha with similar soundset and ready-to-use user interface.

The GUS (Gravis UltraSound) on the other hand had it´s main fascination not in emulating SCC / GM. The GF1 chip on the GUS can make use of up to 1 MB of sample RAM and playback up to 32 voices without CPU consuming software mixing. In the early 90ies it was THE card in the Demo scene and widely used and supported by all popular programs of the MOD/S3M/XM(...) tracker scene. These programs were the first affordable way to produce your own music on old 386/486 machines without using expensive MIDI hardware samplers, so this scene was quite big back then. On these slow machines it was possible to do MOD tracking also with Soundblaster cards, but the sound quality was really terrible as the processing power was a bit short for quality software mixing of the voices. The AWE32 was mostly unsupported by the programs (and also more than twice the price) so everybody being serious about tracking bought a GUS.

The normal GUS had 16 Bit DA converters but only 8 Bit AD converters in the "normal sound card department" of the card. So a lot of early demo/MOD music uses 8 Bit samples. The GUS MAX corrects this flaw and features 16 Bit conversion both ways. BTW, there was also a low-cost version called GUS ACE that had no AD converters at all and was meant as an add-on for people already owning another sound card.

The GUS PnP was the next generation card from Gravis. It had better quality converters and a new chipset that could emulate the GF1 but also access up to 8 MB in native mode. When the PnP was launched, the time of the DOS-based trackers was nearly at an end. Windows 95 and the Pentium era brought more processing power and new companies produced affordable normal sound cards with better specs than the still crappy SoundBlasters. Furthermore Gravis never managed to release a bug free Win95 driver for the card. So the success was limited and Gravis decided to go out of the sound card business.

About the Turtle Beach Maui: I owned a TB Tropez card which is quite similar to the Maui. The Tropez featured up to 32 MB of RAM and high class converters. Back then it was about 300 Euros, so it was quite similar to the AWE32 but more expensive and more professional sounding. You could use the RAM only under Windows and sadly, the patch and sample edit software was quite crappy.

If somebody´s interested in developing a simple DIY sampler with fat, a bit LoFi sound, the GF1 chip of the old GUS might be of interest. The chip comes in a non-SMD package - don´t know if you can get an extensive data sheet. The PnP and Maui (and also the AWE32) are IMHO too HiFi for a new design - you can buy e.g. an E-MU ESI 32 sampler that has 32 voices, variuos good-sounding filter modes, SCSI interface etc. for under 200 Euros these days, so there´s no sense in new developments.

This information is brought to you by

Dr. Greyhairs Seppoman

who suddenly feels a bit old talking about long-gone times ;)