How To: Gravis ULTRASOUND (GUS/ULTRASND)

[AutumnSounds]

If you've ever played Doom with a Gravis Ultrasound rather than the stock synthy plinky-plonky tones screeched out from a Soundblaster you know how privileged you were back in the day.

For those unfamilliar, here's a little copy/pasta from wiki: "The Gravis UltraSound was notable at the time of its 1992 launch by providing the IBM PC platform with sample-based music synthesis technology (marketed as "wavetable"), that is the ability to use real-world sound recordings rather than artificial computer-generated waveforms as the basis of a musical instrument. Samples of pianos or trumpets, for example, sound more like their real respective instruments. With up to 32 hardware audio channels, the GUS was notable[citation needed] for MIDI playback quality with a large set of instrument patches that could be stored in its own RAM."

@SentaiBrad and I have come up with a simple solution that doesn't require you to have a set of patches installed in each and every DOS game you've installed.

Here's how to get these awesome sounds working with your (compatible) MS-DOS games:
* You first need your GUS patches (the internet is your friend to find these). They'll generally come in two flavours; ULTRASND411 and ULTRASNDPPL161 depending on which type of sound you prefer.
* Take which ever one you want (I'm using ULTRASND411) and rename it to simply 'ULTRASND'.
* I've placed this ULTRASND folder in my LaunchBox\DOSBox\GUS\ directory.
* Not every game supports GUS, but for those that do edit the game in LaunchBox and create a new Mount pointing at the DOSBox\GUS directory where we've placed the ULTRASND directory.
* In this example I've set the GUS directory to E:\
* Either within the main 'Edit DOSBox Configuration', or in a separate custom .conf config for the specific game, Enable Gravis Ultrasound and set the path to what would be the mounted drive containing the ULTRASND patches. In this case it's e:\ULTRASND.
* You can now head into your game's audio config/setup and choose Gravis Ultrasound as your Midi player.

Hope that helps!

Edited August 12, 2018 by AutumnSounds
Fixing layout.

[SentaiBrad]

Thank you for sharing this! I might even have to try this out.

[AutumnSounds]

SentaiBrad said Thank you for sharing this! I might even have to try this out.

I've just recorded the difference between SoundBlaster (1st segment) and Gravis Ultrasound (2nd) using the 411 patches from within Terra Nova's (game used in the instructions above) audio config and sound test. The difference is striking, but of course the beauty of using GUS patches is that if you don't like, for example, the sound of one of the guitar patches you can just find a different one and change it. And Warcraft 2. Soundblaster 16 first then GUS.

[Cebion]

Now the same with Roland MT-32 with Munt and General Midi (Preferable something like SC-55 with SoundCanvas VA and LoopMidi) 

Good Job