Ultrasound Daily Digest     Tue May 18 00:07     Volume 3: Issue  48  

Today's Topics:
						  [GUS] SBOS 2.0B7? 
					Drum Sequencer for Gus/Windows
						 Lemmings II and such
					 New Version of the Software
					  Peace comes to the digest!
				   Probable 2.04 windows driver bug
					  Slight misunderstanding...
					   Text to Speech synthesis
			   Ultima 7.5 memory management (Sorry!!!!)
					Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #47

Standard Info:
	- Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest.
	- Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ.

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

Date: Sat, 15 May 1993 21:23:41 +0000
From: mike@kingpin.demon.co.uk (Mike Parkins)
Subject: Re: [GUS] SBOS 2.0B7? 
Message-ID: <737501021snz@kingpin.demon.co.uk>

ReprintFrom: comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard

In article <C71DuA.8y2@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca> ptran@sciborg.uwaterloo.ca writes:

>The DAC emulation have not changed from 2.04.  For most people it seems
>to work fine, but for me, and apparently for you, it does not.  The only
>recourse for me has been to use SBOS 1.20, which works damn near 
>perfectly.  If you haven't already tried it, give that version a go.
>How do you know you won't like it if you haven't tried it?
>
>Phat.

It's amazing isn't it. The first release of SBOS is still the only
one that works reliably. Out of curiosity I have been downloading
the latest SBOS when it appears on epas but apart from a few nicer
sounds and a volume adjustment facility, it hasn't been worth it.

Version 1.22 is still the only version I have that works properly
with Ultima 7 (The Black Gate), or 7.5 (Serpent Isle). The later
ones sound terrible, like a chorus of out of tune chainsaws.
Only the digital effects are OK on SBOS versions above 1.22 -
(I lost my copy of 1.20 but it is probably similar).

-- 
Mike.

DISCLAIMER ================================================
 | kingpin.demon.co.uk is my own private host, which is 
 | unconnected with BBC Monitoring. My opinions are my own.

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 93 10:11:57 PDT
From: jericho!gord@uunet.UU.NET (Gord Wait S-MOS Systems Vancouver Design Center)
Subject: Drum Sequencer for Gus/Windows
Message-ID: <9305171711.AA17749@ jericho>

Phil Johnson writes:

>  Is there a drum machine prog out there (pref. Windows, but not necessary)
>that allows you to save the drum sequence as a Gen'l MIDI file? 

I am hoping to use PowerChords for exactly this purpose if it gets 
in my hands before I'm old and grey (:( ..
The PowerChords demo version has a drum rhythm editor section that
seems decent. We are supposed to get a copy of PowerChords free with
the official 2.xx GUS SW release, so hold on to your cash for a litte
longer..

gord@smos.com

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 14:31:39 -0400
From: John Morton <jmorton@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Lemmings II and such
Message-ID: <93May17.143142edt.43228-3@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>

I installed Lemmins II on my computer and noticed that some sounds
are missing. When my roomie loaded(with a SB)it he got the lemmings saying
"Let's go" and groans when the lemmings fall etc.  I get the music
but these little extras are missing.  Is this just another one of 
those differences between sound blaster and GUS with SBOS or do I have
a setup problem?  I am running SBOS1.23 (? the beta).

Thanks for any help,

=================
John, CS241 Tutor
jmorton@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca

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

Date: Sat, 15 May 93 23:49:56 EDT
From: thduda@mosaic.uncc.edu (Tony H Duda)
Subject: New Version of the Software
Message-ID: <9305160349.AA17911@mosaic.uncc.edu>

	Have the Gravis ship the new version of the software or the new version  of the SBOS out to the ultrasound owner, yet?
	What's the newest version of the SBOS?  Is it 2.05 or higher?
	Thanks.

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

Date: 17 May 1993   11:21:42 PST
From: chrisw <chrisw@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Peace comes to the digest!
Message-ID: <9305171830.AA13178@leland.Stanford.EDU>

Hi all. Just thought you might be happy to know that Lance has kindly
explained his behaviour and apologised for it being somewhat innappropriate.

You see, Lance had a bad day on Friday. He came home from work to find a 
letter on the table explaining to him that every friend he thought he had 
(even his family!) were in fact FBI agents who had been tracking him from 
birth due to an unfortunate filing mix-up many years ago. Now that it had
come to light that he was in fact not THE Lance Hartmann (known for 
terrifying the general public with threats that he would eat their 
suburban shopping malls) they had decided to reallocate their staff towards
tracking eachother. (Can't be too certain, now, can we?). What's more, they'd 
taken all Lance's frozen dinners with them AND the bottle of scotch they'd
given him for his last birthday. 

In desperation Lance turned towards his computer: at least there he could be 
sure of finding real companionship! Alas, half-way through reading the GUS 
digest Lance sees my post containing the words : "THEY'RE JUST FRIENDS". 
It's too much. Lance collapses, sobbing. Before he slashes his wrists he 
writes his famous last post, a final cry against the world!

Fortunately, the FBI agents have absconded with his razor. What's more,
as he stares blankly out of the bathroom window he catches sight of the full 
moon shining tranquilly upon him. Lance realizes that there ARE things worth
living for in the world, and promptly packs his bags for a trip to Los Vegas 
for the weekend.

Seriously, you all be kind to my good friend Lance, now. He's been living
in fear of this posting all day :)

Chris.

P.S. O.K. Music from now on ...

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 93 15:31:05 PDT
From: jericho!gord@uunet.UU.NET (Gord Wait S-MOS Systems Vancouver Design Center)
Subject: Probable 2.04 windows driver bug
Message-ID: <9305172231.AA18869@ jericho>

If you have a midi adapter, you may see this one:

If you have midi in connected, and you have a synth or drum machine
that are sending midi bytes, windows crashes when you boot up windows.

Workaround: disconnect the midi in before starting up windows, re-connect
when windows is up and running.

Anyone else with a midi setup, give this a test to see if it crashes on you.

Both my drum machine and my Synth (RX5, DX7 from yamaha) continuously send
midi active sense bytes. I had left midi in connected from the night before,
started up the box, then tried to start up windows 3.1. It took me a few tries
to figure out that midi in was crashing windows at startup on me. I had
found a similar problem with sbos crashing while midi in was connected
before..

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 93 10:23:07 GMT+0200
From: Walter Prins <prins@cs.sun.ac.za>
Subject: Slight misunderstanding...
Message-ID: <9305170823.AA18729@itu2.sun.ac.za>

Dean Ross-Smith Wrote:
>To Walter Prins in South Africa and the rest of you complaining about noise-
>(this is a long shot-) Could it be caused by a noisy power supply (ie cheap)?
>Could the noise be because of a bad case design?
>And finally- Are there any flourescent lights around your system?  I have a
>flourescant desk lamp that puts a slight "hum" in my clock radio if its
>playing, and either my stereo or my adlib card pick up the noise too (one is
>hooked to the other).  How 'bout it folks?
>
I think there was a slight misunderstanding here, I was *praising* my 
GUS for its noiseless sound! Also my sampling does *not* exhibit the 
problems others have been referring to.  (And I might add that I *do*
have a noisy power supply or whatever, judging from the amount of buzz
I got from my old SB 2.0... or perhaps its just intrinsic to the SB
8)     )

Sorry for taking up bandwidth with this...


---------------
Walter Prins                                  Email: prins@cs.sun.ac.za
University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.            prins@itu.sun.ac.za
Department of Computer Science

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 93 10:51:08 EDT
From: rd@pixie.aii.COM (Bob Thrush)
Subject: Text to Speech synthesis
Message-ID: <9305171451.AA27194@pixie.aii.COM>

  I had the following thought from one of my colleagues and wondered
if anyone on this list has considered it?

Chris writes:
>My Mom has trouble reading because of cataracts, so she sometimes gets audio
>books out of the library. Of, course, the selection is always limited and
>not necessarily too current because of the effort for someone to record them.

>So you think of text to speech synthesizers, of which the ones I've
>played with on my home PC - are really crude (like SBTALKER for Sound Blaster)

>You mentioned that the Gravis actually uses a number of sampled instruments
>to construct synthesized music. Somehow the 256k or 1 meg is "home" to a lot 
>of instrument samples (patches?) which are "assembled" into the synthesized
>music via MIDI.

>Has anyone made a MIDI speech synthesizer? In other words, since all speech
>is constructed out of phonemes, why couldn't these phonemes be recorded just
>like music instruments - the "instrument", in this case, is someones actual
>voice recording the phonemes of english speech.

>This would then be married to the "front end" of something like SBTALKER,
>which instead of trying to go text to speech, would go text to MIDI, and the
>MIDI, played by the Gravis - generates any number of "real" synthesized
>speech - your favoite actor or whatever. Or multiple actors, for the
>different characters in the book (detecting the change in speaker in the
>text is another problem).

>Anyway, is this feasible? Has someone done it so I can get the MIDI files
>and text to MIDI generator for my mom?

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 93 02:39:39 EST
From: Jerry <QAAA@vm1.si.USherb.ca>
Subject: Ultima 7.5 memory management (Sorry!!!!)
Message-ID: <9305170648.AA13303@orca.es.com>

I hope I did not cross the FAQ line and wasted bandwith.

After some sleep I remembered reading about a fix on EPAS, well, ..., it
worked. So ignore the preceding ramblings. I can currently run U7.5 with
SuperStor loaded low, SBOS loaded High, Mouse loaded High, DOS high, without
any problems (591K free low and 3000K XMS) with the help of TLB-V220. Next
thing to do is to find a SIMPLE cache (SuperPCKwik and Norton Cache are messing
my configuration) that can be loaded high. It can surely be found at WUARCHIVE.
I will look tomorrow and if this work then I will be happy for at long time.

		Sorry for the inconvenience...    Jerry
											QAAA @ UDESVM
											QAAA @ VM1.SI.USHERB.CA

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

Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 09:35:25 -0700 (PDT)
From: Vincent Poy <hippo@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu>
Subject: Re: Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #47
Message-ID: <Pine.3.05.9305170923.B7785-c100000@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu>

On Mon, 17 May 1993, Ultrasound Server wrote:

> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Sun, 16 May 1993 16:59:51 -0700
> From: dross@ultrix4.csubak.edu (Dean Ross-Smith)
> Subject: noise SB and other miscellany
> Message-ID: <9305162359.AA13532@ultrix4.csubak.edu>
> 
> Ok, I've had my GUS for a couple of weeks (it came with the 2.04 SBOS)
> and it's ok.  My last soundcard was a 3 year old original Adlib (this is BEFORE
> the Soundblaster existed), and when I got it, there weren't a lot of games that
> supported it either (just like the GUS now).  I bet things will change.  I'm
> happy to play with my new toy- even on my crusty 2.5yr old 386sx.  So to those
> who are complaining- hold off a bit till after the end of the year.  We're in
> between seasons for major introductions of games.  Let's just wait a bit.
> Gravis- keep up the work guys.  I wish you many sleepless nights so you can
>      deliver excellant product.
> 
> To the guy asking about installing the Soundblaster- I tried irq 240 and couldn't get my Adlib to work.  I tried 260 and it worked fine.     ^^^^^^^ oops!
> port 240.  I've used DMA 1 and 5 (currently 5, but 3 will work i guess).
> Good luck!
> 
> To the guy in South Africa oops!
> To Walter Prins in South Africa and the rest of you complaining about noise-
> (this is a long shot-) Could it be caused by a noisy power supply (ie cheap)?
> Could the noise be because of a bad case design?
> And finally- Are there any flourescent lights around your system?  I have a
> flourescant desk lamp that puts a slight "hum" in my clock radio if its
> playing, and either my stereo or my adlib card pick up the noise too (one is
> hooked to the other).  How 'bout it folks?
> 
> Dean Ross-Smith (dross@ultrix4.csubak.edu or dross@sparc1.csubak.edu)
> 
> PS can someone list the chips we should use to upgrade GUS memory? the manual
>    says TI and my card has Kyocera (or something like that)
> 
> ------------------------------

Dean,
	Well, From my experience, All memory that I have tried is ok except
for NMBS, The Samsung and Hyandai's work with no problems whatsoever...
Stay away from the less popular brands like Kyocera you were talking
about... Motorola, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, TI, NEC all works very well...
I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Vince

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End of Ultrasound Daily Digest V3 #48
*************************************
