Ultrasound Daily Digest     Sun, 11 Apr 1993     Volume 3 : Issue  11 

Today's Topics:
					 Gusmod and thoughts on GUS 
				 Gusmod and thoughts on GUS (Part 2)
					   Ultrasound Daily Digest
					Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #10
						 World Circuits Patch
					  X-Wing Fighter Slow Down 
						 Your reply in V3N10

	Information about the UltraSound Daily Digest (such as
mail addresses, request servers, ftp sites, etc., etc.) can be found
at the end of the Digest.

	*** HEY!!! *** 

	Before you ask a question, *** READ THE FAQ ***.  It's
available on the request server and the ftp sites, or check the
newsgroup archives.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 18:17:18 -0400
From: "It's your hand, Buckaroo" <dantonio@magick.tay2.dec.com>
Subject: Re: Gusmod and thoughts on GUS 
Message-ID: <9304102217.AA25319@magick.tay2.dec.com>

> From: hodgen@informatik.uni-koblenz.de writes:

Re: GUSMOD 2.11

> Is anyone out there having similar problems?

YES! I also have an Adaptec 1540B, on IRQ 11, no less, and GUSMOD 2.11 (and
2.10) consistently mess it up. Big Time. If the MOD file is on the IDE
drive (and in the current directory) GUSMOD works fine. If it's on the SCSI
drive, GUSMOD locks up and it take a RESET of my machine before the Adaptec
is back to normal. For this reason, I don't use GUSMOD much so I don't know
if there are other problems. I've sent mail a couple times to CyberStrike,
but have gotten no response, which doesn't make me very happy, either...

I've got a 486/33, 256K SRAM Cache, AMI Bios and OPTi chipset (no DMA
problems, though), 8 MB memory

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 18:19:41 -0400
From: "It's your hand, Buckaroo" <dantonio@magick.tay2.dec.com>
Subject: Re: Gusmod and thoughts on GUS (Part 2)
Message-ID: <9304102219.AA25333@magick.tay2.dec.com>

Sorry about that, hit the wrong key...

Adaptec 1540B SCSI card at IRQ 11, DMA 5 (I think, mostly the defaults)
209M SCSI disk and Chinon CD-ROM off the Adaptec
239M IDE drive
GUS at 240,7,7,15,5
SB 1.5 at 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1

DDA

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 15:21:41 EDT
From: bpaulsen@viewlogic.com (Bill Paulsen)
Subject: Re: Ultrasound Daily Digest
Message-ID: <9304101921.AA06674@mako>

Please remove me from the Ultrasound mailing lists.

Thanks,

paulsen@viewlogic.com

------------------------------

Date: 11 Apr 93 13:27:54 U
From: "zz Paul Murgatroyd" <zz_paul_murgatroyd@macmail.bu.oz.au>
Subject: Re: Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #10
Message-ID: <9304110320.AA04455@kirk.bu.oz.au>

Dave,

>I ftp'd gus0017.zip through gus0021.zip but had
>no success writing them to a floppy.   The error
>message seemed to indicate that the floppy copying
>program on my Sparcstation IPC felt that gus0018.zip
>would fill up the empty floppy.  I then noticed the
>size of gus0018.zip, about 1.45MB, which is a tad
>bigger than what 3.5" floppies are supposed to hold.

Yes, I also had problems. I made the mistake of downloading them
straight onto floppy disks, in effect chopping off the last few Kb
of the files that wouldn;t quite fit. PkZipFix did the job in 
replacing the missing segments. 
  The reason the files are bigger than a floppy disk is this: 3 of
the disks will completely fill up a 1.44Mb floppy (ie:0 bytes free).
The information on the floppy disks is already compressed into files
called ULTRASND.001, ULTRASND.002 etc. If you then archive them into
a .ZIP file for distribution, the .ZIP file itself will make the overall
length of the file bigger than a floppy disk, although the stored files
within the archive will still unzip perfectly to a blank 1.44Mb floppy disk.


>Any workarounds besides the very laborious process of 
>unzipping on my workstation and then rezipping (with fewer files)
>or whatever to get them on my floppies?

What I suggest (if possible) is to FTP down to a hard drive, and
unzip from the hard drive to a floppy. You will not have any problems
with that at all.

>Thanks for any help on this.   Maybe I'll get lucky
>and get the disks in the mail.

Maybe they'll make a mistake and send you 1 million dollars instead :-)

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 14:48:27 EDT
From: hellfire@acs.bu.edu (Peter ng)
Subject: World Circuits Patch
Message-ID: <9304101848.AA36409@acs.bu.edu>

The patch for Wolrd Circuits is out. It adds head2head play and fixes the
preious joystick problems. It doesn't have the native GUS support though.
does anybody know when the patch for GUS support will be coming out?

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 18:28:52 -0400
From: "It's your hand, Buckaroo" <dantonio@magick.tay2.dec.com>
Subject: Re: X-Wing Fighter Slow Down 
Message-ID: <9304102228.AA25369@magick.tay2.dec.com>

>  The solution is to turn off the
> music, or turn off the digital sound. It doesn't matter which, but you can't
> have both on, as I can only assume SBOS can't handle the load of playing
> digital sound and music at the same time. I play X-Wing with the music turned
> off.

The problem, from what I see, is in LucasArt's code! I have a 486/33 and a
SB 1.5 and there is a slight delay when a TIE fighter goes by or the
lasers are fired. If it slows down with SBOS, too, then the problem ain't
the SB 1.5. And games like Wing Commander manage to do both with no
trouble...

DDA

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 93 10:47:40 MET DST
From: hodgen@informatik.uni-koblenz.de
Subject: Your reply in V3N10
Message-ID: <m0nhaHP-0001qSC@uniko.uni-koblenz.de>

>      Do you still have problems if you remove the SoundBlaster? When I first
> got my GUS, I also left my SoundBlaster installed (against the instructions in
> the manual). The SoundBlaster caused me all sorts of trouble once the GUS was
> installed, even when both boards were assigned completely different Base
> Address, DMA and IRQ numbers. This may be the source of your problem. Running
> SBOS with a SoundBlaster installed seems pointless, and was the major cause of
> my problems.

It could well be the source of the problem but lets face it, a SoundBlaster
is better than SBOS. I play a lot of games with my machine and at the moment
I need an SB to play the music since only SC2 has native GUS support. All I
can do with the GUS is play MOD's and MIDI files (which I do). If it comes
down to a choice between SB and GUS for games *now*, the GUS comes out my
main machine and into my Mailbox machine. However, I recieved mail from
tmcreek@eos.ncsu.edu which may help (I'll be trying out his suggestions
later today). I hope he doesn't mind me including his mail below.

t> I have almost the exact same config as you.  I have a 1522 instead of 
t> a 1542.  It is on INT12, port 340.  I also have a Soundblaster Pro
t> at 220.  Now, my first intention was to put the UltraSound at 240.  But
t> when I installed it at this address, my HD said controller failure and
t> wouldn't boot!  So I moved it to 210, and I haven't had a problem since.
t> 
t> My advice to you: Unless you have already tried it, change your port
t> address on the GUS.  Try 210 first as 260 didn't work well for me either.
t> It appears that some programs (especially stuff from Renaissance) scans
t> the addresses from 210 to 260 to find the card.  A lot of times, when I
t> went back to the hard drive, it would hang.  Moving to 210 fixed that.

> In all fairness to Gravis, the GUS has not been around for very long. I bought
> mine in mid November, and was surprised to find that the readme files were only
> a week old. You have to keep in mind that games are usually in development for
> 1 year or more, and with the GUS being as new as it is, you have to allow a
> decent amount of time for the GUS to be included in a game during development.

I have kept this in mind. Thats why Starcon2 caught me offguard. It came out
too quickly. As I said, by August or September there should be an ever
increasing software base. When that happens I'll start beating the drums for
GUS again (for normal users). I've imported 19 GUS cards into Germany for
myself and friends. We don't mind that the card and software are still very
young, it's all part of the fun of being in at the birth of something new. But
I can't recommend this card to normal users with an easy conscience, not yet.

> The Pro Audio Spectrum boards have only just started getting decent support
> over the last few month, and support for the SoundBlaster Pro is still minimal.
> Hopefully the GUS will not be far behind these. I will not be buying any more

Hopefully the GUS will be well in front of these cards. The difference SB ->
SB Pro or PAS is not that great compared to SB -> GUS. Anyone who isn't
completly tone deaf can hear that.

Bye.
-- 
Wayne Hodgen  | hodgen@infko.uni-koblenz.de | Opinions (c) Me 1991   | Intel SX
Uni Koblenz,  | (..!unido!infko!hodgen)     | Keeper of the Scrolls, |  Just
Rheinau 3-4,  | Voice: +49 261 9119-645     | Defender of the Net,   |   say
5400 Koblenz. | Fax:   +49 261 9119-499     | His name is "root".    |    NO!!!

------------------------------

End of Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #11
*************************************
