Gravis UltraSound

» see gravis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The board was red. That is the first thing anyone says about it, because in 1992 every other sound card in a PC was the standard green and this one arrived looking like a decision. Advanced Gravis Computer Technology was a Canadian company out of British Columbia, founded in 1982, better known at that point for joysticks, and in October 1992 it shipped the Gravis UltraSound alongside the Gravis PC GamePad.

The card worked differently from its competitors in a way that mattered. Where a Sound Blaster synthesized music with an FM chip, approximating instruments out of arithmetic, the UltraSound's GF1 chip played back recordings. You loaded actual samples of actual instruments into RAM on the card, up to a megabyte of them, and the chip mixed as many as 32 of them in hardware. The GF1 was co-developed with Forte Technologies and descended from Ensoniq's OTTO chip, which is to say it came out of the professional sampler world rather than the PC beeper world.

There was a cost, and it was an honest one. Polyphony traded against sample rate: full CD quality up to fourteen voices, sliding down to 19.2 kHz if you asked for all 32. The programmer picked. That is a knob almost no consumer sound card has ever exposed, and it tells you exactly who Gravis thought the customer was.

I went online in 1998, and by then this card was already finished. In Turkey the sound card in your machine was whatever the shop had put there when it assembled the box, and what the shops had was a Sound Blaster or something wearing its name badly. The UltraSound was a thing you read about rather than a thing you were offered, and by the time the hardware forums here were busy enough to argue about audio, the argument had moved on to onboard AC97 and whether you needed a card at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the scene ~

Tracker music came off the Amiga and onto the PC in the early nineties, and it works by storing the actual instrument samples inside the song file. Every other card had to mix those samples in software, burning CPU and degrading the audio on the way. The UltraSound could load them straight into its own RAM and mix them in silicon. For MOD and S3M and later XM playback it was not slightly better, it was a different class of thing, and the demoscene noticed immediately.

Gravis understood what it had and leaned in, seeding cards to scene groups and supporting the tracker community directly. It worked, in the sense that owning a GUS became a marker of belonging for a specific and intensely loyal population. It did not work in the sense that mattered to the accountants, because that population was small and the people buying sound cards at retail had never heard of any of it.

Some games did meet it halfway. Doom, Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D all shipped with their own patch-mapping files for the card, tuned so the limited sample RAM held the right instruments for that soundtrack. The shareware end of the industry, Apogee and id in particular, took the UltraSound more seriously than the boxed retail publishers ever did.

~ the decline ~

The GF1 had no OPL2 circuitry and no codec, so Sound Blaster compatibility had to be faked in software. That meant SBOS and Mega-Em, terminate-and-stay-resident emulators that ate conventional memory and fought with the DOS extenders every game of the era was built on. Getting a game to make noise could mean editing autoexec.bat, swapping the sound driver in the game's own directory, and knowing which DMA channel would not break DOS4GW. Retail return rates were high, and stores stopped wanting the box on the shelf.

Then Gravis damaged itself. It published a list of upcoming games that would support the card natively, and the list turned out to include titles whose publishers had agreed to no such thing. Several of them threatened to sue over it. A hardware company with a compatibility problem can recover; a hardware company that developers have stopped believing cannot.

AMD licensed the design in 1995 and shipped it as InterWave, which fixed most of the technical complaints: 16 MB of sample memory, no sample-rate penalty at full polyphony, hardware FM emulation. By then the Sound Blaster AWE32 existed and AMD had financial troubles of its own and closed the project. The UltraSound line ended with the PnP and PnP Pro cards.

~ what got buried with it ~

Advanced Gravis had come close to three hundred employees and had been the largest maker of PC joysticks and gamepads in the world, and it had bet a great deal of that on the sound card. Shareholders sued the management over how the whole effort had been run. Kensington Computer Products Group bought the company towards the end of 1997 and steered it back to the controllers it had always been good at, and the Gravis name survived on gamepads for a while and then stopped meaning anything. The website was still up in the mid-2000s, out of what looks like inertia.

The card refused to die properly. DOSBox emulates it, and so do MAME and PCem and 86Box, which means a whole generation who never saw the red board hears its output every time they run something from 1994. In 2022 Ian Scott built PicoGUS, a modern card on a Raspberry Pi microcontroller that speaks the same protocol to real DOS machines. The sample-RAM approach Gravis lost with is now simply how audio works. Software mixes hundreds of voices on a general-purpose processor and nobody thinks about it, which is the ending where you are proved right and it does you no good at all.

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