| 7. Misc stuff |
Here are some random copies e-mail I've shared with some other GUS enthousiasts as well as advanced issues that might be of interest.
Index
Molnár László wrote:
> I am Leslie from Hungary. I have got an UltraSound Max
> card. I have installed Win98 and the GusMAX driver from the
> internet. But there are no midi input and output ports. I
First of all, you need a specific MIDI adaptor. Click there for the "official" info: http://www.gravis.com/support/faq_sound/sound_25.html
As for the driver itself, Gravis did not write a 32 bit MIDI port driver. You will have to use the 16 bit driver, ultmport.drv. For a weird reason, it only works with MIDI out and not MIDI in. I've tried everything quite some time ago and I've never been able to make MIDI in work.
The fact that MIDI in doesn't work *might* be due to the fact that we're using win95 drivers, although I can't confirm this. If you have some time to loose and don't mind using win31 drivers, you can try your GUS with the win31 drivers and MIDI in might work. See this: http://www.gravis.com/support/faq_sound/sound_index17.html
This solution is way out of line, and I haven't tried it. Besides that, you do have some alternatives. The easy one is to to pick up a used 8 bit SoundBlaster, it will have a MIDI port that should work fine. The other one is a hack that has been posted to the GUS digest a few months ago. You can try it out, but I haven't tested it:
Subject: Re: midi miseries
From: muehle@Ptprs1.phy.tu-dresden.de (Volker Muehle)
Hi,
I've made a fix for the GUS MIDI-out problem (at least for mine
:).
After I updated my system to a Pentium 200 I couldn't get the MIDI-out
working anymore. MIDI-in works flawless, but with all windows
and almost all DOS based applications only a small part of the
MIDI stream came to my external keyboard, giving a lot of noise
because of all the missing note offs.
Because it worked on my old system (486DX), it had to be a timing
problem,
so I made a quick and dirty hack for the windows driver.
I can't take any responsibilities for it, it just works for me
(both with Win3.1 and Win95). I'm afraid there's also a drawback
on the MIDI timing for the MIDI input (you notice a -maybe nice-
small reverb if you use local on and route the MIDI in stream
back to the external synth), this will be nasty if you send a lot
of controllers.
The idea is a simple delay of all outgoing bytes, there are two
loops.
:loop1
< --
move ax,loopcount1
|
nop
|
dec ax
|
jnz loop1
----
do the output
:loop2
< --
move ax,loopcount2
|
nop
|
dec ax
|
jnz loop2
----
Fortunately there was some unused code in the driver to fit the
additional code in. I didn't test if you really need the second
loop.
Maybe you have to adjust the loopcounts for your system, it even
works with both equal 00ff, but that makes you can hear the delay.
loop counts(marked with *): loopcount1 [05d3] before output
(for me
3f )
loopcount2 [05e1] after output (for me
0f )
original ultmport.drv (size 11648 Bytes date 95/03/20)
Offset
000005C0: 5E 8B E5 5D CA 02 00 55 8B EC 56 57
8B 56 08 8A
000005D0: 46 06 EE 5F 5E 8B E5 5D CA 04 00 55
8B EC 56 57
000005E0: 8B 56 08 8B 46 06 EF 5F 5E 8B E5 5D
CA 04 00 5A
new: (changed offset |05cf...05e6| )
Offset
000005C0: 5E 8B E5 5D CA 02 00 55 8B EC 56 57
8B 56 08 |90
000005D0: 90 90 B8 *3F 00 90 48 75 FC 90 90 8A 46 06
EE 90
000005E0: B8 *0F 00 90 48 75 FC| 5F 5E 8B E5 5D CA 04 00
5A
I hope it works for you.
vII
Molnár László wrote:
> I have an other problem too. I have changed my
> mainboard/cpu and when I record sound in full duplex, it is
> distorted.
Be sure that you have two different DMA's for your record and play channels. If it still doesn't work, this might be due to the fact that you're using 16 bit DMA's, they've caused some problems many years ago. Try DMA's 1 and 3 which are 8 bit DMA's.
