GUS Programmer's Digest Tue Jun 15 00:07 Volume 2: Issue 13 Today's Topics: A SBOS question Hey! SDK with MS QuickC Standard Info: - Meta-info about the GUS can be found at the end of the Digest. - Before you ask a question, please READ THE FAQ. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1993 02:43:51 GMT From: gmontem@eis.calstate.edu (George A. Montemayor) Subject: A SBOS question Message-ID: ReprintFrom: comp.sys.ibm.pc.soundcard -- Why can't Gravis create an SBOS program to emulate Sound Blaster Pro? What's so hard about doing that? Won't it be like SBOS except that it must keep track where to play which instrument? It would be nice if Gravis Ultrasound can also emulate the Sound Blaster Pro. I don't mind whether GUS can or cannot emulate SB-Pro. I was just wondering. George Montemayor ----------------------------------------------------- Kids, ask your parents before you mail to me. $2 for the first line. $.45 for each additional line. ----------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Jun 93 16:18:04 CDT From: ddebry@itchy (Dave DeBry) Subject: Re: Hey! Message-ID: <9306142218.AA01128@itchy> So speaks Ed Reddy (mailed to ultrasound-owner@dsd.es.com): > When do you guys plan to get off your BUTT and mail your fellow Canadians > the new GUS disks!?!? > Stop playing the friendly DIPLOMAT and think about those at home! > You guys are something else... This mailing list is not supported by Gravis or Forte. I'm doing this myself, because I think the GUS is a great card and needs an information channel. Gravis and Forte read the list, and sometimes post to it, but that's it. Notice the site name: dsd.es.com. Do you see the word Gravis in there? Nope. Not even a hint of it. Don't send me stuff like this. (Sorry to be so humorless about this, but I don't like getting Gravis' hate mail. I've got enough people on my bad side already. :) -- Dave ddebry@ debry@ \ DeBry dsd. peruvian. | "Yeah, a meeting! It's like talking to es. cs.utah. | yourself, only with a gang." com edu / ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 15:18:17 -0500 (EST) From: James Reutter Subject: SDK with MS QuickC Message-ID: <9306142018.AA21271@orca.es.com> Here's a puzzler that I'm hoping someone out there may be able to give us some pointers on. Any responses at all would be appreciated. (Hey, I'm not proud. I'll take educated guesses, folk remedies, whatever you've got!). To respond directly, please contact me at Internet address: jreutter@indiana.edu BACKGROUND: I'm working at the Indiana University Speech Research Laboratory, in Bloomington. We've recently begun development on a simple speech processing system for voice playback, for use in psycholinguistic experimentation. The basic idea of what we're doing is to measure subjects' reaction times to speech stimuli (for now, these are short, one second or less, speech samples). The whole shebang is written in C. Where the Gravis card comes in is in playing the speech stimuli. (These are just pre-recorded .SND files). I know that the card is configured correctly because it seems to work as advertised when using the DOS executables (e.g. PLAYFILE). We're trying to play from DRAM, because our application is time-critical, and we can't wait for disk IO. We're using the latest SDK (version 2.01, which we ftp-downloaded), calling routines from the ultra0lm.lib and ultra1lm.lib. The C compiler we're using is Microsoft QuickC, version 2.50a. We've been running into several problems, which I describe in detail below. If anyone has had successful experience with the C libraries, doing anything remotely similar (e.g. buffering anything to DRAM) I'd sure appreciate you're getting in touch, to see if I can figure out what we're doing differently. I will of course be happy to provide more details about our configuration or code on request. PROBLEMS: We are experiencing several, possibly related, problems. The first is sound quality. Using the C library routines from the *old* SDK (version 1.09, I think), the sound quality seemed reasonable. We checked it out on the provided samples, and samples we recorded ourselves. However, when we made virtually identical calls to the new SDK, the sound quality is highly degraded (very staticky). But we're also experiencing a much weirder problem. Using the EXAMPLE.C program in ULTRASRC provided in the SDK, I directly adapted that code to pull out just the functionality to download a file to DRAM, and then play it out. This worked (sort of. Sound was recognizable, but highly degraded, as mentioned above). This code uses a 'C' switch statement, to allow the user to pick the option. E.g. Enter 1 to download, 2 to play back. When I modified this code for use within my application, I took the exact same code as above, except pulled out of the switch statement, since we didn't need to prompt the user, and got nothing. I heard the slight "pop" that accompanies the beginning of playback when a volume ramp isn't used (as is the case here) but no sound playback. Attempts at debugging showed nothing amiss (i.e. all return codes were normal). The code in these two cases was quite literally identical, except that the non-working version did not have a switch statement. I even tried to put in a timed delay between DRAM load and playback in the non-switch version, but this made no difference. I verified that the source code for the two versions was identical using a file compare. The only thing I can even begin to guess at here is that there is some kind of problems with interrupts that is triggered in one case but not the other. We're going to keep looking at the problem, starting with a new compiler, but in the meantime, please let me know if y'all have any ideas. Thanks again. --------------- END ------------------------------ End of GUS Programmer's Digest V2 #13 ************************************* To post to tomorrow's digest: To (un)subscribe or get help: To contact a human (last resort): FTP sites: archive.epas.utoronto.ca pub/pc/ultrasound wuarchive.wustl.edu systems/msdos/ultrasound Hints: - Get the FAQ from the FTP sites or the request server. - Mail to for info about other GUS related mailing lists (UNIX, OS/2, GUS-MIDI, etc.)