                   GUS rulez?

Some say Gravis UltraSound is the best soundcard
ever manufactured for a PC. Others' opinion tell
about Sound Blaster having this rank. Which side
is  right?  Me, personally have a GUS Max, and I
used  to own a Sound Blaster Pro previously, but
I think many of you walked this path.

I  am  unsure  which  card is better. Of course,
wavetable  synthesis  is  far  more  better than
Adlib FM, what Sound Blasters have. But have you
ever  heard  an  AWE32?  Well, not better than a
GUS,  but even not worse. Some say Sound Blaster
is  noisy,  and  GUS not. Well, I heard many SBs
without any noise; of course not SB 1.0s, but SB
16s.  What  really  makes the GUS uncomfortable,
that   it   is   completely   incompatible  with
everything, not counting SBOS, but some may know
how  it  works...  shitty  is not a word for it.
Then  GUS  PnP came, and Advanced Gravis claimed
it is compatible with Sound Blasters on hardware
level,  but  despite my efforts, I couldn't find
a  single  FM  chip on it. It is even not always
GUS   compatible   under  DOS.  And  what  about
Ultrasound   software?  Uhhh...  buggy,  shitty,
unusable,  and  so  on.  I  always wondered, why
Advanced  Gravis don't support older programs by
making   his   card  completely  SB  compatible.
Creative   did   it  when  designing  the  first
Blaster, I mean Adlib compatibility.

A coder, of course, prefers UltraSound, since it
is programmable by only using I/O operations. It
does  mixing  itself  through hardware, while SB
is  not  able  to  do  it,  so you have to do it
yourself.

So  after  all:  Gravis  UltraSound  is  a  fine
soundcard,  with good design, but poor softwares
and  bad  marketing strategy. If Advanced Gravis
will  ever  make a soundcard in cooperation with
Creative, it will undoubtedly be THE sound board
for  PCs.  Until  then,  both sides suck. SB'ers
with  demos,  GUS  freaks  with  games and other
programs.

