pouët.net

Hey,

Finally decided it was time to stop using my GUS cards strictly for games and embrace the awesome demoscene that was going on in those days.

Are they are any particular memorable ones I should check out? I really liked all the stuff Weird Magic did. There was one on their defunct website they mentioned called shoong or something similar that effect, but I could not find it anywhere. Monolife and F.C. Twente are awesome. I really loved the F.C. Twente one. The NWO08 issue they were involved with was pretty cool too.

Anyways, I'm rambling! Post some of your favourites to this n00b to enjoy. All on OG hardware on P2'era stuff, so the troubled ones typically run fine for me (there was maybe one or two that no matter what I could do I couldn't get sound from them, but if I remember I will post it here).

Ah, FC Twente.. I had hair then..

My god you should definitely look at some other stuff before you label the things we did as "awesome" (thanks for the comment though :))

Browse the Groups. Look for prods by Complex, Halcyon, Nooon, Orange, Coma, Eufrosyne, Jamm, Pulse from around 1993-1997... Nice stuff and prob a lot of them have GUS support

Might try out some Orange stuffs. what seppe says.
A some of the earlier demos actually supported gus only, you should check those out. if you find :b

thiz might be a start? http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2586

Hmm, why gus-ONLY? Anyway I recommend pretty much everything seppe_wm mentioned, as well as tpolm, satori and blasphymy/purple.

gus only, as in gus _only supported_. what i mean about that, is that those demos could be lesser known, because either A: they don't run unless you have a GUS and might be interesting to watch with GUS-sound(?). Or said another way if it runs without sound, its more interesting to listen and get a broader perspective on how the overall demo-feel is to it. that's just a personal thought. i just mentioned he could check those out too. not only in the sense only-gus supported demos. get it?

What GUS cards are we talking about here? I mean, if you really want to see an Interwave card act like a trainwreck, I'd recommend Stuff from Xtacy. Then, watch it with a proper GUS :)

I'm talking about gus only demos in that they were mainly written for the GUS, typically have either GUS or no sound or a half-assed non-supported SB Pro implementation as well.

Stuff meant for the GUS Classic or MAX. None of that GUS PnP shit. I heard those were awful and it's compatibility was really shoddy, apparently. Never personally owned a PnP though.

My collection contains a few PnP cards, so I can attest that they are terrible at what they ought to be capable of. There are claims that running SBOSMAX makes the Interwave cards run less out synch, but I honestly never tried.

I know we're getting slightly-OT now, but what was the problems with the PnP/Interwave-era stuff?

I didn't have any (unsolvable) problems with my Gus Pnp, and with some tricks it wouldn't use any dos memory either.
With 8mb on it, it was a great mod player.
It was quite tricky to get it to cooperate with a sb16, but after disabling some irq's and dma's in the gus, you even had one irq over for a whoopingly fast 10 mbit network card.

I think =MS-Dos%2Fgus&order=thumbup]this url is a very good choice imho :)

MEH, bbcode fuxxed my url :(

unfuxxed gus demo link :) (hint: replace "[]" with "%5B%5D" when linking to pages by platform)

THIS: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=8704

http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=161

I did a slightly lengthy post about that mildly a lifetime ago: http://pouet.scene.org/topic.php?which=97&page=1 -short of it: timing is off which really becomes noticeable with long sample loops (e.g. beats) when you run software meant for the GF-1 on Interwave.

Bump on this. So I've went through quite a few here's some of the ones I particularly enjoyed (I won't say awesome this time and jump the gun!) and jah-jah lot of orange, but I really do like their kind of surreal-ish style:

* Orange - Secret Life of Mr Black
* Orange - Compost
* Orange - Agent Orange (not the craziest demo, rather blandish, but I enjoyed the music a lot. The fly-by kind of reminds me of Forsaken for N64)
* Orange - Sea of Robot Love
* Orange - Super Television
* Orange - you am i you am the robot
* Nooon - Cob (This one seems to have a lot of controversy on pouet? anyone want to tell a more elaborate story on why this is)
* Nooon - No
* Darkzone - Debut
* Select - Selectro (No super slick effects, but liked the music. A good small intro IMO)
* Psychic Link - Paper
* Tran - Hell
* Iguana - Heart Quake
* Weird Magic - Monolife (mentioned before, but I still always return to this one)

I gotta be honest... I checked out Twilight Zone - The Jungly Kitchen and it kind of bored me. Fun artwork, but the soundtrack didn't do it for me and the effects weren't enough to keep my attention.

If there's some others I should be seeing then tell me! I've been through all the Orange and Nooon stuff already. On somewhat related note, the new school orange prod Media Error with FLT and Cyberiad was fun too. That exploding smoke trapped inside the glass box was a really cool effect.

Hellraiser by Megabusters, jizz and stash from tbl, dope by complex, finkel by jamm, xtal by complex, stars by nooon and smegma and puker from success.

Oh, fashion and spring! And all the other stuff from logic design.

Gotta chime in here and add

mfx - Transgression 2. Great soundtrack & realtime quasi-raytracing from 1996 - runs fine on any P1 if you tweak the settings. What more could you want?

Pulse - Sunflower is another cool one with a *really nice* example of an 18-bit fakemode... but it just about requires a good CRT to see properly. Trying to run it on an LCD that stretches pixels (i.e. all of them) spoils the illusion.

Sunflower - Zilog (yes, Pulse made a demo named Sunflower and Sunflower made a demo named... not Pulse) is a brilliant chill, ambient demo with some great visual style. Also runs in a fakemode.

Also the Camorra demos (Gust, Gustar, Gustation, etc.) (most of which *also* use a fakemode! - is there a trend here?) are pretty good. I like Gust which has a really oldschool feel.





Really? I have two of them (one PnP and one PnP Pro) in two different machines (5x86/100 and P233) and found them to be *great*. I've never had a timing issue... They have full, seamless compatibility to the GF1 as far as I can tell; every GUS demo/anything I've ever tried runs perfectly on an Interwave. (Compare that to absolutely terrible backwards compatibility among SB cards - I've had more luck getting Surprise! - Copper to make sound on ESS chips than I have on a "real OPL" SB16 and have *never* gotten it to work with an AWE64.)

Stuff a GUS PnP full of RAM (8MB, or 16MB with a hack) and it is an *awesome* card for tracking in IT - full MIDI support with sample playback, rock solid MIDI timing, and better DACs than a lot of other ISA-era cards that I've tried.

The drivers & PnP shit can be a pain to set up but once you've got them working they stay working so you only have to go through it once. And I've never found setting them up to be *that* bad (certainly easier than getting ALSA/JACK to cooperate.)

I'll check these demos out.

OT: But I've heard a lot about the 16MB hack, but I have not found a textfile on it anywhere. Can anyone link to one? Curious on what has to be done for those cards.

The problem with the old SBs is that the chip responds very slowly to commands, so often detection/init routines will not work on a fast CPU (they usually apply delay loops with a fixed number of iterations, which execute too quickly on a fast CPU).
A modern clone such as an ESS will respond much more quickly, so it gets detected even on fast systems.
Crystal Dream already had problems detecting my real SB Pro even on a 486DX2-66 or faster. So I reverse-engineered the code, and found that it was not just a case of number of iterations, but the code was also broken in some ways. I replaced it with the detection/init code from the official SB programming docs, and then it worked just fine.
I suspect that a lot of demos suffer from the same problem, which means the SB code will work on a clone or in Dosbox, which responds almost immediately to commands, but not on a real SB.

Some motherboards have the option to set delays for 8-bit and 16-bit ISA. I had some problems running my GUS on my P2 400mhz with some weird arifacting going on in 16-bit mode until I upped the delay cycles in the BIOS.

This could possibly be a solution to people who have problems detecting their GUS on later machines.