Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica

Klaster_1•24 minutes ago

Man, throwing away a GUS Classic 20 years ago alongside a bunch of other obsolete PC hardware was something I still regret to this day.

microtonal•about 2 hours ago

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.

We also had their gamepad at some point.

mscdex•about 2 hours ago

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/

sgt•10 minutes ago

Seems like the chip is available here: https://www.utsource.net/itm/p/762821.html?srsltid=AfmBOoraT...

ecliptik•about 2 hours ago

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.

1. https://github.com/ecliptik/doskutsu

sys42590•about 1 hour ago

Former FastTracker II [1] user reporting in.

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.

nubinetwork•about 2 hours ago

Cool, I saw this one pop up on tindie a few months ago, sold out instantly... https://www.tindie.com/products/kdehl/gravis-ultrasound-gus-...

marticode•about 2 hours ago

Oh wow thanks, I had completely forgotten about the Ultrasound even though I loved mine back in the days.

dark-star•21 minutes ago

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

naturalmovement•about 1 hour ago

> 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?

nubinetwork•41 minutes ago

It was used on other sound cards as well, you don't have to get one from a broken gus.

guff_se•about 2 hours ago

” 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”?

yestergearpc•about 1 hour ago

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).

naturalmovement•about 1 hour ago

Cool.

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.

kalleboo•about 2 hours ago

He did a live stream of some of the reverse-engineering work https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2814615896

Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews