Gravis UltraSound
More info
- Manufacturer
- Advanced Gravis
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Sound card
- Memory
- 256 KB–1 MB
- Voices
- 32
The sound card the demoscene adored — wavetable with its own sample RAM that mixed 32 channels in hardware.
The Gravis UltraSound (GUS) shipped in 1992 from the Canadian firm Advanced Gravis. Its GF1 chip did wavetable synthesis with dedicated sample RAM — 256 KB, expandable to 1 MB — and could mix up to 32 voices in hardware. You uploaded the instruments once and let the card handle the rest, instead of loading the CPU the way the Sound Blaster did.
That made the GUS the demoscene's favourite: MOD and S3M music sounded cleaner and cost less CPU than on the competition. Many demos supported the GUS first and the Sound Blaster second, and "GUS-only" releases became something of a status marker. It was never a commercial blockbuster — but in the scene it was king.