REVIEW: Gravis Ultrasound Max, Rev 2 (1 meg ram installed)

An old, but high quality sound card. This is a wavetable sound card, with a 6 meg patch set, swapped in at demand into the 1 meg of on card RAM (maxed out, 512k standard).

The card can play back 32 voices at time, but you wouldn't want to, since the sound quality goes way down, especially if you are starting with 44.1khz samples. Better to think of this card as having 16 voices (mixed and played back at 44.1 khz), with a few to spare, "just in case".

Since the card uses RAM the samples are user expandable, and many people have done just that. Surf the net and you will find many GF1 .PAT files, some of them of excellent quality. The only real problem is that most patches are so big that you can only fit a few in the on board GUS RAM. The GUS PnP card lets you use up to 8 megs of RAM, but it has not been as popular as the GUS MAX/Classic. Since both cards are now discontinued, it is quite a little game to find
either for sale.

In this day and age it is sad that I need mention Sound Blaster compatibility, but that is one sore point of the GUS line of sound cards - there is no OPL chipset on the GUS. Instead, it uses a software FM Synth, which, when it works, can sound better than the real thing, about the same, or much worse. Beyond the SB, the card also supports the Roland midi standard with a cool ass protected mode emulator that requires no conventional memory. Note that neither of these emulation programs work under anything but Doz95less DOS.

The card uses one or two DMA channels for recording and playback, and DMA 1 for SB compatibility, which is optional. Either one or two IRQs can be used, using one works most of the time, but two must be used in order for the SB emulation to work. Any ports from 210 to 260 may be used, altho I suggest that you do not use 260, since some software doesn't work with that port setting (personal experience talking). The GUS is getting fairly old, but it is still well supported in native mode in DOS, and LINUX support is. As you can see, I am very happy with mine.

BTW, this is one long ISA card, coming in at 27.5 cm. Many people will not have a slot free that is long enough for this card. According to Gravis, the GUS PnP is about 25 cm in length, so keep that in mind before you think about buying one of those, instead.