LGR - Gravis UltraSound: 1992 Sound Card Retrospective 

I bought one of these when they first came out. However, I was really disappointed with how much trouble it was getting it to work with games that didn't have native support, which was most games. I think it was a mistake to release the card without a YM3812 compatible chip on board. That's where Creative Labs made the right choice in their SoundBlaster to maintain backward compatibility.

Basically the emulation was them saying “this is a sound blaster, it sucks don’t buy it” lol

Make a video on the card you got sent from russia . Innovation SSI-2001 . Its a very very rare card, only handfull are still functional and the guy engineered and made it from pictures of the card by himself since he did not find any schematics.

My first Windows PC, in 1991, had an ultrasound. I didn't realize how lucky I was until I went to a friend's house and he had a sound blaster.

Oh man, I've been itching for this video :D I got a GUS PnP many, many years ago, and to this day I cannot relate to the hype. It's a jack of all trades type of card, but other cards can do FM better, SB better, GM better and MT-32 of course. I found it to be a resource hog, taking a ton of interrupts, though there are workarounds. In general I found the installation process and getting it to work quite involving. The tracker support in demos and Epic games are the real highlights, though I believe the Sound Blaster driver is simply using a lower sample rate in Epic games, I wonder if someone could hack the driver to address this and support a Sound Blaster 16 for example. Thanks for this honest take on the GUS!

Oh man! The GUS. I longed for this card in my younger years. I ended up with the Sound Blaster AWE32 though. EDO RAM chips et al. I was big in to the module tracking scene back then. These cards where the SHIT back then. What a great flashback this is. FastTracker / ImpulseTracker flashbacks all over. #shivers

Even more, the Ultrasound was THE soundboard of the PC Demoscene!

I remember listening to DOOM 1 shareware with a GUS in a college dorm room. Wow. Choirs and all that.

GUS sounded like crystal, and still does. Like classic synths or musical instrument, these boards ages very well and still are an enjoyment to the ears. There are dozen of epic tunes (mostly coming from the demoscene or Amiga games ports) that were even more epic with this almighty hardware. But they were, and still are, a pain in the ass to setup.

Dammit I lost my ultrasound ace card years ago while moving. Ah the first moment when you try to play canyon.mid and suddenly hear quality instruments.

Welcome back Clint! I'm already enjoying the video before watching it :P

Clint thank you for these looks back. The 1990s were the golden era of gaming and PC stuff to me. I was a young 20 something then and was until the end of the 90s. Its still my favorite time of my life. Your looks back take me back and give me that warm feeling of being there again. Thanks man.

I used the GUS mostly for making tracker music back during the early 90's.

Wow, that Epic Pinball demo blew me away! The Ultrasound with that game almost sounds like a studio recording, and in comparison the Sound Blaster sounds pretty much exactly like a Flash futuristic puzzle game from the early to mid 2000s. I think I may have found a new favorite sound card! Excellent video as always Clint, keep up the good work!

This brought back so many memories! The test sounds, listening to MOD files, buying RAM upgrade chips from London Drugs, getting upgrade disks in the mail (i live close to Burnaby BC) , the sales guy at Future Shop telling me they don't sell medical equipment when we asked for an Ultrasound, heck my friend even mentioned "32 digital sound channels" in my high school yearbook (yeah we were nerds). I still have it all.

In 1983, when I was debating on purchasing (my first of many) GUS, the store owner said something to me that I have never forgotten. When I asked for his opinion of the GUS, he said, "I wouldn't trade it for a warp core." I will never forget that quote. By the way, he was correct. (DEMOSCENE 4 EVAR!!!)

Wow, what an interesting soundcard. I like its sound along with the Roland MT-32 sound module. Also, I kind of want to cover that Duke Nukem song on PC Engine since I've been hearing it multiple times in your videos. Great video as always! 👍🏽

Thanks LGR being waiting for this video ever since you mentioned it in your last video about taking a break great work enjoy your time off man!

I remember growing up back in the mid 90's when i had my first pc when sound cards were more popular than video cards.

I bought one of these (the GUS Classic) in 1992. Upgraded it to 1MB and I still have it in my retro pc from 1997. Worked great with the games I played, as they all supported the GUS. I had it hooked up to my surround system, and it was also very nice to listen to music (Mods and Demos) played through it. I also got the Gravis Gamepad. :) Greetings from Norway.

Ahhh yes, another one of those magical items. During the setup of many'a'DOS games, I always sat and wondered about the Gravis UltraSound devices and what mysteries they hold. Between that and Hercules graphics cards, the world of computing always had me wondering what else was out there. Thanks to LGR, I can see firsthand what all these things were and satisfy my vintage curiosity.

Ahhh! The Nostalgia! This why I Subbed to you and 8-bit guy a LONG time ago! Finally we get the low-down and spotlight on this legend!

The only place I welcome elevator music is, here. 😀

Holy hell! Other people bought that card besides me? Loved the sound but hated the compatibility problems. Epic Pinball? What a flashback! Thank you!

Gotta love the big "ASSEMBLED IN CANADA" on the card :)

the two Canadian Knights of computer tech back then, Adlib and Gravis.

So many capacitors, that appeals to me.

Great vid man, thanks for that! I can't believe how great Jazz Jackrabbit sounds with the GUS. Absolutely love my SoundBlaster AWE32 PnP CT-3980, I believe it was the last SoundBlaster to have the Yamaha OPL3 chip, but do correct me if I'm wrong.

Uploaded: 47 seconds ago. Well then. I have no choice.

I loved my Gravis Ultrasound. And the Gravis Phoenix was THE way to play Descent. Thanks for the overview!

5:09 "shipped to the land of John Candy" today's generation will not know what that meant

Wow, this holiday ended fast :D Something tells me you didn`t have a proper holiday :D Good to have you back :) :)

I am happy to own one. It's actualy a clone, made by primax, but it is 100 percent compatible with a one meg Gus. It's in my retro p3. I am now collecting Gus compatible games. For soundblaster compatibility i have an on board crystal soundchip, which works well in dos.

I had an Advanced Gravis Ultrasound MAX. It was awesome in its day. A full length ISA card. The holographic sound was pretty cool back in the day too.

Fun fact, Deadmau5 were in the demo scene back in the days :)!

That moment when you watch a video about soundcards and an old game you loved playing when you were a small child and the name of you forgot shows up xD. Thanks you very much for that odd coincidence. Now i know its named Descent

Up for the mention of Star Control II. Best soundtracks ever.

I never realized how much background noise the soundblaster had back in the day. That gravis ultrasound is very impressive!

19:06 - nothing has ever looked more 1996 than those box graphics

Gravis Ultrasound was a gem to have. Everything sounded amazing with it. From Castle Wolfenstein to Raptor call of the shadows to Epic Pinball. I remember the audio being even better than the Soundblaster Awe 32!

Ouch. Sampling =/= Wavetable synthesis. Wavetable synthesis is more or less looking up a specific wave in a set of them. Gravis, and other cards such as the Soundblasters that use "wavetable synthesis" just use PCM samples,most of the time (I dont know if any of them really used wavetables as in what PPG Wave, the mentioned Ensoniq's or other synths). I know its how they advertised it then, but i just wanted to clear it out for the others. Great video none the less!

Welcome back! Hope you had some good relaxation, happy for the new video :D

I have waited a long time for this video :) l was not dissapointed, I love that you recorded your emotions when discovering the higher sound quality. I feel that's what sepperates you from other youtubers. Showing your true personality and feelings, not playing a role, that gives me feelings, in addition to the overall high quality video. And my gravis tutorial videos did not become useless as I feared :p

When i first heard the first few seconds of Guitar Slinger with the VO, it was reminding me of the music used on the Wii Homebrew Browser, and it turns out my hunch was right, Jogeir Liljedahl wrote that song too, it's called Addiction.

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into videos like this! I feel like you're doing some really important historical work!

Nice! I had the Gravis Ultrasound as a kid. I remember game support was spotty.

This is gonna be epic, I can't get enough of your videos on classic sound cards and old-school PC audio stuff! Thanks for another deep dive into some beloved tech, Clint!

Yeah, when it comes to noise level, Ultrasounds were incredibly clean. With GUS PnP I was recording music like a boss and didn't care about noisy input, until I switched to SB Live lol

Excellent video! If I may comment, I think you overlooked a bit the Mega-Em part. That was a killer application for games that did not support native GUS. Back in the days, MT-32 provided the best music, but it was not an affordable device. It was sort-of semi-pro, and ultra expensive (also not sold in computer shops). Later there was the rise of the "MIDI daughter boards" (Sound Canvas, Korg) that provided amazing MIDI sound.. But that was absolutely not compatible with MT-32 (because the instruments were mapped differently). MegaEm, on the other side, provided a more than decent MT-32 emulation (with the possibility to change the sound samples, improving the default ones). The Mega-Em MT-32 emulated music in games such as Monkey Island was far, far superior than with the Adlib/SB. And since so many games supported natively the MT-32, at the end the GUS was usable in a lot of games with the best possible sound. (SBOS was okay-ish for the voices). Of course the drawback was that the MegaEm thinggie could appear a bit complicated for non-technical people who just wanted to plug and play.

MOD music-based games where the point where the GUS *really* shined.

I need to buy a chip fab so I can clone the gravis. (Edit: Nevermind. Someone beat me to the punch. I should wait until I finish the video to comment.)

I had one of these back in the day, right after I graduated high school.

Ya i think the better audio clarity of the UltraSound vs the Sound Blaster was because it had a better amplifier. On a side note the Adlib/FM synth cards can sound better then they did but game developers didn't want to spend the time tuning the instruments.

Typed in Gravis in RU-vid and LGR is the first hit. Not surprised at all!!!

It's finally here! I've been waiting for this since you got that second Gravis Ultrasound in one of your mail unboxings in 2017!

I knew a rich kid back in the day. He was the only kid in our neighborhood who went to a private school so we never saw much of him. I remember his dad showing off this sound card and Wolfenstein blowing my mind. The turd also owned a neo geo.

Gotta love how no-one has completely seen the video yet but everyone is still commenting just because.. why not? 🤔

Second Reality made the GUS must-have hardware. I don't know if I've ever bought PC hardware specifically for a single piece of software except for this one. All of the tech speak that you see in the manual is a reminder that most of the time we put into PC gaming back in the day was in getting that shtuff working with our hardware to begin with! LOL (...bad flashbacks to getting Wing Commander 2 to run in base memory...)

Congratulations on getting your hands on it. These look back videos are always great

The Gravis Ultrasound card was pretty much the hardware of choice in the demoscene during the nineties. Practically all demos, intros and music software that was released back then only contained support for the GUS. I believe it was the ability to offload sample mixing to the card, that made it so popular by programmers, because it saved a lot of expensive CPU time that could now be used for other calculations. And next to that, the audio quality was much better compared to Soundblaster Pro and 16. I still have one lying around (a GUS MAX to be exact) and already refused to sell it at least a couple of times for prices above €350,-. But I'll sell it for 1 BTC ;)

that epic pinball's sound difference got me like GOD DAMN, stereo crisp ringing clean af

11:10 Not that the GUS doesn't sound great, even better than SB AWE32 from the comparisons I've heard, but a SB16 seems like a more fair comparison since Pro 2 only has 8-bit stereo at 22Khz.

It's late and should be in bed but alert a LGR vid, So I'll say just one more vid. *sounds* good to me, how about you? This video gets the woodgrain *seal* of approval👍 Edit 2:42 Omg we had one of those Gravis PC Pro joysticks for our AST 486! that was our first ever joystick. Played xwing none stop with that thing! 2021 And I found a near mint condition PC Pro joystick thrifting yea!!!

I had a GUS mainly due to the demoscene but still had to keep Sound Blaster around. Hooray for Renaissance (Amnesia!). Glad I kept my GUS and GUS PNP.

Sounds absolutely fantastic. Really impressive, clear audio and a red PCB too? Very yes. Amazingly generous donations!

I got a GUSMAX because future crew demos and scream tracker 3 supported them. The sound quality was a massive jump up from the SB Pro 2 which remained in the case beside it for games that didn't support the GUS. Ended up getting the GUS PNP, by that stage software mixing made cards like the SB16 sound virtually identical and with the MMX drivers in Impulse Tracker using the GF1 chip was pointless as you were limited to 1MB of ram and the sound quality got super bad over 14 channels, I guess people like these cards because at the time they were quite close to professional, even today it's surprising how clean the output was. Gravus were overtaken by Creative with the AWE32 (reverb and chorus, way better sounds but some odd results depending on what the composer used) then left for dead with the release of the SB Live! .... ahhh great memories, thanks for the nostalgia trip.

Now I understand why people liked this card so much, the sounds really did sound superior in the programs that supported it that is, the other unsupported programs just sounded weird but that's understandable because not all software is developed for the same hardware.

I had that card on mid 90s for music editing and mastering.. great and clean scard

1:08 Holy s**t, that's an incredible difference in sound quality!

I remember that I picked up one of the first GUS a long time ago (couldn't remember how I got it, but definitely not in new condition). Tried it out mostly for testing. Loved the sound it produced but I had some compatibility issues, especially with games at that time. Went back to SB16 I think. I threw away my GUS back in 2009 due to lack of use and lack of space in the house. Had I known that it would become a collector item, I definitely would have kept it.

OK, I clicked so fast. I had a GUS Max back in the day with the full 1MB and I loved it. I'd been a fan of the demoscene and had a *huge* collection of MODs (also my stock-in-trade for BBSes), so there was no question about buying one. Hell, I didn't even mind the wonky compatibility. I found for most games that between all the various emulators, I could find something that sounded decent. And it was so worth it for that amazing sound when something did support it natively.

I loved Impulse Tracker! I made a song after the first date with this girl I met. I let her hear it... And we've been married 17 years.

Best episode of LGR in a while (as well as the Gizmondo one). I love how you not only take a look at the hardware itself, but also include the history behind it, the package, the setup, demos, and other tidbits. Your channel is what got me into PC gaming back in 2010, and unlike other youtubers, you've only gotten better with time. Keep doing what you do Clint.

The GUS died off for one simple reason: No Windows support. There were only some very basic and extremely buggy beta Windows 95 drivers released, which only did basic single-channel output, did not support wavetable MIDI at all, and thus offered nothing over the plethora of cheapo SB clones by then available. I had a GUS classic back in the day, and ended up popping a $20 OPTI 82C931 card in next to it for Windows audio. The GUS was a wonder in DOS, but as the gaming scene quickly moved on to the Win95 DirectX CD-audio era in ~1996, the GUS was sadly rendered useless. As shown, some later GUS cards gave you a WSS or SB clone built in, but the GF1 wavetable capability was never made usable in Windows.

Wow this reminds me so many good sweet memories ! I had that first Gravis Ultrasound in my first PC (leaving the Commodore stuff). I had so much fun with it. Finding on that early Internet era many midi banks for some amazing instruments emulation : It was so perfect for Karaoke songs (knows as .KAR files) and .MID as well. The lack of support/emulation for games didn't made me that sad as I wasn't an hardcore gamer. It was just fine for me to play some games like the Epic Pinball or those Commander Keen, Jazz and other little games of that era. Thank you LGR for bringing back to life this era ! \o/ PS: Sorry, english isn't my native language. French Canadian here. :P

Gravis Ultrasound was by far the best sound card of the era. If you fiddled with MegaEM you could enjoy absolutely awesome MIDI sounds from games which offered General MIDI or MT32 music options like Masters of Orion & Magic, Stunts, Stronghold, Gold Boxes, etc..etc... However, that was just icing on the cake. The sample based audio system made it absolutely fantastic (music) tracker card (e.g. Fasttracker 2) and made programming game sounds & music really easy. It was rather sad, that it did not do perfect emulation of Sound Blaster before ACE...when the concept was already outdated. Hilarious detail was that I was able to use my old 286's video card (I think it was a Trident TVGA) RAM chips on the GUS to upgrade the memory to 1 MB. :-D

I freaked out when you mentioned Star Control 2. It was one of my absolute favorites.

This card was popular with musicians of the music tracker scenes, thus support in games was not a big concern for that crowd. Being a tracker user myself, with many sound cards, the card while playing eventually loses some of the playback in the virtual channels of the tracker software, I remember in programs like impulse tracker you have to regurlarly do "control + i" to manually re-initialise the card and get all channels to playback. Apparently, the Gravis did not have that problem (but never had one so cannot say if this is true).

Considering inflation, the card is actually, at worst, half the price it was originally.

At the 4:40 mark, I'm guessing there were no more 8 bit cards in this time period. I didn't see the Thunderboard listed under Mediavision's list! I had one for several years. It was a pretty neat little card back in the very early 1990s.

Reminds me of the times when there was all that cool and expensive hardware I could have never afforded.

with UltraMID and the game SEAL Team it was a real nightmare, because the game itself required 600kb of conventional memory, while Ultramid took 50kb and you also needed a mouse driver ;)

I never knew that Gravis made a soundcard back in the 90's as my dad and I were primarily Creative Labs users back then. Just hearing the soundcard in action via an uploaded video is impressive.

The GUS was always mythical to me ever since the demo scene stuff on PC (knowing it on Atari ST before through family). In 1996 when the PnP came out I convinced my dad to buy a Gravis Ultrasound, but had to decide between the Max en the PnP. Wish I had gone with the Max instead, because demo scene stuff didn't use the PnP at all (at least not that I can remember. Seeing here there are clones by Argus really makes me want to check that out.

4:53 Just cuz it caught my eye, how many of you recognize the term "TSR"??

I own (still do) a 1MB GUS and loved it - but your comparison to SB PRO 2 wasn't really fair. SB cards were terrible until the SB16 because they were 8bit - the difference is night and day. Comparisons to the SB16 would likely render identical results. I also owned an SB16 alongside the GUS which was a perfect setup back in the early 90s. Keep up the great work! More GUS please!

Man, I'm almost tear eyed. I never got to use a GUS back in the day and now I see they were actually as awesome as we thought.

I had a GUS MAX back in the day, and it's one of the few old bits that I regret selling off. :(

The Gravis Analog Pro is the most phallic joystick I've ever seen.

Damn, I've sold the first GUS for $100 in 1998!

20:14 Holy Christ, One Must Fall was my favorite game ever when it came out.

I still have a GUS installed in the ancient 386 PC. Second Reality! And its set of MIDI examples...

I haven't finished the video yet, admittedly, but browsing through the comments, where is the love for FM synthesis? I always thought wavetable synthesis (as on the GUS here, and other chips, like the SB AWE series and especially the Super Famicom/SNES' S-SMP chip) sounded really awful compared to good FM synthesis. I already know I wasn't alone, so where are my other FM fans at? (*'▽')

Clint! Welcome back!

Welcome back from your vacation!

the gravis just sounds overall fuller. like its completely uncompressed. i would have loved this years ago. something to mess with

So Crystal Codec was night and day compared to SB's codec. (your Jazz comment about how good it sounded). Pretty amazing. I remember being blown away when I installed my GUS Max. Great video, man. Thorough as always.

I find that pin header just on top of the ISA connector very interesting. The layout leads me to believe that's a breakout of the entire ISA bus. wonder what that would have been used for back in the day -- now, I'm sure any enterprising individual could think of countless uses for it.

This was a massive jump in audio tech. For graphics we had a 3dfx voodoo, for audio there was GUS.

Gravis Ultrasound was my very first sound card bought in 1993. I still have it in my retro PC for DOS gaming.