I love your review style, great production, information and no bullshit. I'd love one of these cards, but at those prices, it would have to be something I find, forgotten in some old PC for sale. I never had a GUS myself, but I had a friend who did, and I was super envious until the day I managed to afford an AWE 64.
Super flexible and sounds great in a lot of games with the GUS pro patches (normal gus mode sounds a bit weird). The electric guitar in GUS/GUS Pro sounds really weird to me, but i'm sure many people love that sound. ESS music surprises me yet again. It adds a lot of depth and sounds great compared to Yamaha OPL. Great vid as usual! Thanks.
Main fault of this card is not having a 26 pin wavetable connector for the MPU-401 on the ESS chip. It is understandable they didn't put that because of the GF1 + MegaEM simulating MPU-401, but we know that software emulation suck. Other than that this is a great combo card. It combines the GUS capabilities with the ESS good FM sound + pretty much perfect Sound Blaster Pro compatibility. On the other hand it could never justify pay the prices that are asked for this card. Usually good motherboards for DOS have more than 1 ISA slot so combining a separate ESS card with a separate GF1 card or a GUS PnP will give pretty much the same setup, at a loss only of 1 ISA slot but for much less money. Your doing a great job with your channel, keep it up.
Is it just me, or the Pro Patches sound better than everything else?? It just sounds like it combines the best of both GUS & SBPro into making the songs sound as rich and as detailed as possible.. (Too bad it replaces the electric guitar in Quest for Glory.. As the plain GUS made it sound pretty sweet.)
SB support leaves a lot to be desired, it's missing sounds in many games and levels or sounds incorrect to real SB's. GUS Pro Patches is the best option for sure, but isn't enough to make this card extreme.
Wow, Dune 2 on GUS is terrible 😳 I had 2 GUS Max back in the day, I think I played Dune 2 with MegaEM in MT32 mode and it was not good, but wow this takes the shit-cake 😁 But honestly I prefer most Dune 2 tracks on OPL even rather than a real MT-32. Seems more balanced on FM synths. Having said that.. I'm watching through your whole DOS-soundcard quest, but the panning over the cards annoys the hell put of me. Too much zoom, and way to depth of field. Keep it up, but try to zoom a bit less. Your content will improve by that!
