What was your favorite ISA card?

[Tempest]

Originally posted by dparadis
Can't find much on the Gravis anymore... looks interesting though

In the time when sound card manufacturers had finally started bringing their cards to 44.1 kHz and 16 bit levels, it was soon discovered that things weren't all that rosy. MIDI music still sounded awful (good old FM synthesis) and because channel mixing was done by the CPU your average PC could mix a maximum of maybe six to eight sound channels - and that didn't give CPU time for anything else!

The answer came from Advanced Gravis: The Gravis Ultrasound had 256 to 1024 kB of onboard RAM that digital sounds could be uploaded into. When those sounds were needed to play back, the program just sent a request to the card. The GF1 chip in the GUS could mix up to 32 sounds in hardware. This feature made it especially popular among those composing music in the Amiga-derived module music formats.
Another nice thing was that for GUS, a sample was a sample. So instead of playing back inferior quality FM MIDI music (Sound Blaster 16, anyone?) GUS came with its own 5+ megabyte MIDI patch set. When any MIDI sounds were needed, they were dynamically uploaded from the hard disk to Ultrasound memory and the user could enjoy quality wavetable MIDI synthesis. GUS also had hardware sound interpolation, which meant that a sample played back on the GUS had much less noise than the same sample played back on any other consumer sound card of its time.
The GUS MAX also had 16-bit stereo recording up to 48 kHz.

The Gravis Ultrasound never became very popular. Many if not most of its users belonged to the PC demo scene, and aside from scene productions the GUS was mostly supported in shareware titles such as those from Epic Megagames. I think the main reason for GUS's demise was its own architecture: It was the only consumer card of its time that wasn't built to offer Sound Blaster compatibility. Instead, if you wanted the card to emulate a Sound Blaster or the Roland MT32/Sound Canvas, you had to load a special emulation driver. This was more than you could expect from Average Joe, of course. The unique architecture probably also contributed to the fact that the GUS never got decent Windows drivers.

But it was a good card, way ahead of its time. All my respect goes out to Advanced Gravis because they decided to be different and gave us the card that rocked our worlds
<hr>
Edit: Oh yeah, and the Ultrasound had one of the first implementations for surround sound too. BTW, if there are people who don't know what I mean by "mid-nineties demo scene music", then I've collected a few samples for you here. I recommend XMPlay for playing them back.

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Tempest
Three words: Gravis. Ultrasound. MAX.

Three more words: Couldn't. Agree. More.
And three more: Still. Have. Mine.

[Pace]

Three words: Didn't. Have One.

(yes, and a smiley)

More words: I didn't have many ISA cards, but my USR 28.8 modem is easily the best of the bunch. I might even use it again, in a Linux server box.

P.

[Liquid Snake]

My Courier V.Everything modem

My SB16 was good too. It's still working in my old machine.

[Admiral]

Never owned a ISA card

[Claymonkey]

Originally posted by Admiral
Never owned a ISA card

That makes me feel old

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Admiral
Never owned a ISA card

Lucky Bastard

[Wombat]

Lucky? You're kidding. Man, when PCI was just coming around, and PnP was adopted before it was ready, my favorite cards in the world were any ISA card that I could flip the jumpers around and hardcode the interrupts and memory.

[Admiral]

I did want to get a ISA internal modem a couple of years back but couldn't find one. One of my bro's friends had a US Robotics but before I found out he had already sold it.

[rylan]

I loved my AWE64 sound card.. was one of the versions that uses normal 32pin simms, so I could add 8 megs of memory to it without having to pay through the a$$ for creatives memory modules for the other versions of the awe64 card.. lol

Oh yeah, I've always liked my 3com 3x509b ISA nic.. worked great at school, and we still use those one some networked DOS based diagnostic stations at work.. cackle

[The PIT]

Well most places I've worked at have used the good old ne2000 so I'll go with that.

[MetalCartman]

The Creative Labs SoundBlaster 32 (upgraded with 2x8mb SIMMs) and the 3com EtherLink III.

[Claymonkey]

Man, I must have missed out. The only Awe64 I still have is the value, no simms slots on those.

[Gurm]

Does it have to be strictly vanilla ISA?

If so, my GUS ranks up there (*sniff* I miss that card!).

If not, there are a couple EISA cards I was particularly fond of.

- Gurm

[Jessterw]

Have to go with the old trusty SB Awe64. That and an older USRobotics (pre 3Com) 56k Data/Fax Modem that I still use as a backup for when the DSL goes out.

- Jw