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59-509: The Gravis UltraSound was notable at the time of its 1992 launch for providing the IBM PC platform with sample-based music synthesis technology (marketed as " wavetable "), that is the ability to use real-world sound recordings rather than artificial computer-generated waveforms as the basis of a musical instrument. Samples of pianos or trumpets, for example, sound more like their real respective instruments. With up to 32 hardware audio channels,

118-430: A DOS Box window. The process of patching middleware sound 'drivers' was greatly simplified with PREPGAME utility, which could fix most known DOS games automatically either by correctly installing and configuring native InterWave drivers or replacing the binaries for some rare devices like Covox . It could also update DOS/4GW extender to work around its 16-bit DMA bug. The GFA1 featured a GUS/MAX compatibility mode, but

177-746: A "non-exclusive" license for a year or so), Mozer licensed the technology to ESS. After Mozer's son Todd split off and created Sensory Circuits Inc. , the technology was licensed there. According to the Sensory Inc. history pages and old datasheets, they offered three types of compression: and a few other PCM/LPC based systems. Although Sensory bought up the Texas Instruments ' speech products, their main focus has been on speech recognition, and not synthesis. Professor Mozer's technique not only produced very realistic sounding speech, it also required very little on-chip (later, in software) RAM ,

236-461: A General MIDI-compatible mapping scheme. Windows 95 and 98 drivers use UltraSound.INI to load the patch files on demand. In DOS , the loading of the patches can be handled by UltraMID , a middleware TSR system provided by Gravis that removes the need to handle the hardware directly. Programmers are free to include the static version of the UltraMID library in their applications, eliminating

295-599: A blind student in his class in 1970 asked whether he could help design a talking calculator. Mozer spent 5 years working on it, and his speech technology first appeared in the Telesensory Systems "Speech+" talking calculator, in a chip called the "CRC Chip", more commonly known as s14001a, the first self-contained speech synthesizer chip. This chip was also used in a few arcade games, notably Atari 's Wolf Pack , and Stern Electronics ' Berzerk and Frenzy , and in several of Stern's pinball machines. After

354-445: A breath noise, a growl, and a looping soundwave used for continuous play). This reduces the polyphony again, as sample-based synthesizers rate their polyphony based on the number of multi-samples that can be played back simultaneously. A sample-based synthesizer's ability to reproduce the nuances of natural instruments is determined primarily by its library of sampled sounds. In the earlier days of sample-based synthesis, computer memory

413-768: A sampled bird chirp as the lead sound in the song. More affordable sample-based synthesizers available for the masses with the introduction of the Ensoniq Mirage (1984), Roland D-50 (1987) and the Korg M1 (1988), which surfaced in the late eighties. The M1 also introduced the music workstation concept. The concept has made it into sound cards for the multimedia PC , under the names such as wavetable card or wavetable daughterboard . (See Wavetable synthesis#Background ) The principal advantage of sample-based synthesis over other methods of digital synthesis such as physical modelling synthesis or additive synthesis

472-513: A set of patch substitutions for every possible amount of sample RAM (256/512/768/1024 kB), so that similar instruments are used when there is not enough RAM to hold all of the patches needed (even after resampling to smaller sizes). Unused instruments are never loaded. This concept is similar to the handling of sample banks in digital samplers . Some games — including Doom , Doom II and Duke Nukem 3D — come with their own optimized UltraMID.INI. The UltraSound cards gained great popularity in

531-562: A sparse and expensive commodity at that time. The advanced compression algorithm (patented, an early form of psychoacoustic compression using similar spectra of ADPCM-encoded waves) reduced the memory footprint of speech about a hundredfold, so one second of speech would require 90 to 625 bytes. With ESS-speech, samples that would normally require almost all of the 64 kilobyte memory of the Commodore 64 (if encoded in PCM ) were so small, that

590-506: A three-year exclusive deal with Telesensory Systems from 1975 to 1978, Forrest Mozer sold a 3-year license to National Semiconductor , and they created another chip using Mozer synthesis, the MM54101 "Digitalker". At first, even then, all words were encoded by hand by Mozer in his basement, but in the third or fourth year of the license, National came up with a software encoder for it. After the exclusive license expired (National seemed to have

649-649: Is a private manufacturer of computer multimedia products, Audio DACs and ADCs based in Fremont, California with R&D centers in Kelowna , British Columbia , Canada and Beijing , China. It was founded by Forrest Mozer in 1983. Robert L. Blair is the CEO and President of the company. Historically, ESS Technology was most famous for their line of their Audiodrive chips for audio cards. Now they are known for their line of Sabre DAC and ADC products. ESS Technologies

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708-534: Is that processing power requirements are much lower. This is because most of the nuances of the sound models are contained in the prerecorded samples rather than calculated in realtime. In a contrast to analog synthesizers, the circuitry does not have to be duplicated to allow more voices to be played at once. Therefore the polyphony of sample-based machines is generally a lot higher. A downside is, however, that in order to include more detail, multiple samples might need to be played back at once (a trumpet might include

767-568: Is that the seed waveforms are sampled sounds or instruments instead of fundamental waveforms such as sine and saw waves used in other types of synthesis. Before digital recording became practical, instruments such as the Welte Lichttonorgel  [ de ] (1930s), phonogene (1950s) and the Mellotron (1960s) used analog optical disks or analog tape decks to play back sampled sounds. When sample-based synthesis

826-695: The Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products. Audiodrive chips were at least nominally Creative Sound Blaster Pro compatible. Many Audiodrive chips also featured in-house developed, OPL3-compatible FM synthesizers (branded ESFM Synthesizers ). These synthesizers were often reasonably faithful to the Yamaha OPL3 chip, which was an important feature for the time as some competing solutions, including Creative's own CQM synthesis featured in later ISA Sound Blaster compatibles, offered sub-par FM sound quality. Some PCI-interface Audiodrives (namely

885-537: The Commodore 64 . Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor. Stay a while—stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission . At some point,

944-636: The Fairlight CMI and the NED Synclavier . These instruments were way ahead of their time and were correspondingly expensive. The first recording using a sampling synthesizer was " Stevie Wonder's Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants" " (1979) which used the Computer Music Melodian to create complex melodies and rhythms from sampled sounds from nature. The first tune Wonder recorded was "The First Garden" where he used

1003-649: The Gravis PC GamePad . The Ultrasound was one of the first PC soundcards to feature 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo. The final revision (v3.74) of the GUS Classic features 256 kB of onboard RAM (upgradeable to 1024 kB through DIP sockets), hardware analog mixer , and support for 16-bit recording through a separate daughterboard based on the Crystal Semiconductor CS4231 audio codec . Computer Gaming World in 1993 criticized

1062-730: The VFX1 Headgear virtual reality helmet) and produced by Integrated Circuit Systems under the ICS11614 moniker. The chip was derived from the Ensoniq OTTO (ES5506) chip, a next-generation version of the music-synthesizer chip found in the Ensoniq VFX and its successors. The GF1 is purely a sample-based synthesis chip with the polyphony of 32 oscillators , so it can mix up to 32 mono PCM samples or 16 stereo samples entirely in hardware. The chip has no built-in codec, so

1121-505: The 'Pro' version without any modifications to the card. Released in 1995, this budget version of UltraSound Classic has 512 kB of RAM (upgradable to 1024 kB, just as is the MAX), and has no game port or recording ability. Marketed as a competitor to Wave Blaster -compatible cards, it is supposed to be installed alongside a SoundBlaster Pro / 16 card as a sample-based synthesis (marketed as 'wavetable synthesis') upgrade. A prototype of this card

1180-700: The ES1938 Solo-1) also provided legacy DOS compatibility through Distributed DMA and the SB-Link interface. In 2001 ESS acquired a small Kelowna design company (SAS) run by Martin Mallinson and continues R&D operations in Kelowna. The Kelowna R&D Center developed the Sabre range of DAC and ADC products that are used in many audio systems and cell phones. Forrest Mozer continues his research work at

1239-527: The GF1 chip ideally. The problem with other sound cards playing these formats was that they had to downmix voices into one or both of its output channels in software, further deteriorating the quality of 8-bit samples in the process. An UltraSound card was able to download the samples to its RAM and mix them using fast and high-quality hardware implementation, offloading the CPU from the task. Gravis realized early on that

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1298-588: The GF1 chip, this new design was not able to hold up with the Sound Blaster AWE32 . More than that, AMD was facing financial troubles at the time so it was forced to close many projects, including the InterWave. Due to declining sales, Gravis was eventually forced out of the soundcard business, and the UltraSound's failure nearly took the entire company down with it. Advanced Gravis, once one of

1357-487: The GUS was notable for MIDI playback quality with a large set of instrument patches that could be stored in its own RAM . The cards were all manufactured on red PCBs , similar to fellow Canadian company ATI . They were only a little more expensive than Creative cards, undercutting many equivalent professional cards aimed at musicians by a huge margin. The first UltraSound was released in early October 1992 , along with

1416-651: The IO port range doesn't match the WSS hardware, and can be used for SoundBlaster emulation. The software CD includes a demo that featured "3D holographic sound" through the use of software HRTF filters. Released in 1995, the Ultrasound Plug & Play was a new card based on AMD InterWave technology with a completely different sound set. Supposedly Synergy acted as the ODM-producer for it (as evidenced by their logo on

1475-423: The InterWave were written by eTek Labs, containing the same development team as the earlier Forte Technologies effort. eTek Labs was split off from Forte Technologies just prior to this effort. In August 1999, eTek Labs was acquired by Belkin and is currently their research and development team. Some game developers of the time noted problems with the software development kit and the product's hardware design. On

1534-549: The PC tracker music community. The tracker format was originally developed on the Commodore Amiga personal computer in 1987, but due to the PC becoming more capable of producing high-quality graphics and sound, the demoscene spilled out onto the platform in droves and took the tracker format with it. Typical tracker formats of the era included MOD , S3M , and later XM . The format stores the notes and instruments digitally in

1593-626: The Sound Blaster through their sound hardware. The emulation software ran as a huge TSR that was difficult to manage in the pre-Windows days of complicated DOS extenders . Although there was native support for many popular games that used middleware sound libraries like HMI (Human Machine Interfaces) Sound Operating System, the Miles Audio Interface Libraries (AIL), the Miles Sound System or others,

1652-699: The UltraSound Extreme is a 3rd party OEM system combining the UltraSound Classic with an ESS AudioDrive ES1688 sound chip for Sound Blaster Pro and AdLib emulation. It was produced by Synergy as was the ViperMAX. It has 1 MB RAM by default, but cannot be upgraded any further. All clones use the original Gravis GF1 or the AMD InterWave soundchip. The GF1 was co-developed by Advanced Gravis and Forte Technologies (creator of

1711-462: The UltraSound's Sound Blaster emulation and lack of native support in games, stating that "it is hard to recommend this card to anyone other than a Windows MIDI musician". Released in 1994, UltraSound Max is a version of the GUS with a CS4231 codec on board, 512 kB of onboard RAM (upgradeable to 1024 kB with a single SOJ chip), and Panasonic / Sony / Mitsumi CD-ROM interface slots. CS4231 provides support for Windows Sound System specs, although

1770-703: The University of California, these days as Associate Director of Space Sciences. He was awarded EGU Hannes Alfven Medallist 2004 for his work in electrical field measurement and space plasma and also was involved in building the microphone to record sounds from the Mars Lander. He is a member of the board of directors of Sensory, Inc. Fred Chan held a number of positions at ESS, and was CEO of Vialta , an internet offshoot of ESS, until his stepping down on July 18, 2007, to pursue philanthropic interests. Professor Mozer first became interested in speech technology when

1829-633: The base card was not compatible with the UltraSound Classic unless some memory was installed. The InterWave technology was used in the Gravis UltraSound PnP line of cards. It was also licensed to various OEMs such as STB Systems , Reveal, Compaq , Core Dynamics, Philips and ExpertColor. Some high-end OEM variants contained a full-blown 4 MB patch set in ROM and proprietary hardware DSPs to enable features like additional sound effect algorithms and graphic equalizer . Software drivers for

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1888-563: The card, not unlike how instruments are stored in ROM on other sample-based cards (marketed as "wavetable" cards). The card comes with a 5.6 MB set of instrument patch (*.PAT) files; most patches are sampled at 16-bit resolution and looped to save space. The patch files can be continuously tweaked and updated in each software release. The card's various support programs use .INI files to describe what patches should be loaded for each program change event. This architecture allowed Gravis to incorporate

1947-489: The company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school. The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3-year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so. Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like

2006-522: The company lost credibility with consumers and commercial developers. Several publishers and developers threatened to sue the company over misrepresentation of their products — pointing to outright fabrication of Gravis's list. The shareware games industry embraced the Gravis more than the retail games industry. Companies which did this in an early stage were publisher Apogee and developers id software and Epic MegaGames . Gravis can also claim victory in

2065-423: The company moved from Berkeley to Fremont, California . Around that time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology. Later, in 1994, Forrest Mozer 's son Todd Mozer , an ESS employee, branched off and started his own company called Sensory Circuits Inc, later Sensory, Inc. to market speech recognition technology. In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created

2124-409: The company retreated to its core market, the one which had made it a success — joysticks and gamepads. Emulators with GUS support: Software synthesizers which can use GUS patches: Sample-based synthesis Sample-based synthesis is a form of audio synthesis that can be contrasted to either subtractive synthesis or additive synthesis . The principal difference with sample-based synthesis

2183-520: The demo scene support could be a sales booster, and they gave away 6000 cards for free to the most famous scene groups and people in the scene. As the GF1 chip does not contain AdLib-compatible OPL2 circuitry or a codec chip, Sound Blaster compatibility was difficult to achieve at best. Consumers were expected to use the included emulation software to emulate other standards, an activity not necessary with many other cards that emulated

2242-417: The demoscene, which had taken the GUS to its heart, ensuring a dedicated cult following for a number of years. But without the marketing and developer presence of Creative Labs, Gravis could not generate either the sales or support required for the Gravis soundcard to compete in the mainstream market against the de facto standard Soundblaster. Although the InterWave chip was a substantially improved version of

2301-405: The dominant players in the PC peripherals marketplace, had bet much of the future of the company on the UltraSound and paid the price for its demise. Shareholders sued the company charging gross incompetence by its management, in regards to the entire UltraSound effort. After significant restructuring, including acquisition by competitor Kensington Technology Group (via its parent, ACCO World Corp),

2360-871: The entire game fit into the RAM along with speech, without requiring additional loads from disk. Most recently, ESS SABRE DACs are used in the LG V10 smartphone, with a quad DAC configuration present in the V10's successor LG V20 . A slightly upgraded version of the same DAC in the V20, the SABRE ES9218P, is used in the V30 as well as the V40 ThinQ. The ESS9038Pro is their flagship and competes against Japanese AKM (Asahi Kasei Microdevices) AK4499EXEQ and American Cirrus Logic CS43131 for

2419-411: The file instead of relying on a sound card to reproduce the instruments. A tracker module , when saved to disk, typically incorporates all the sequencing data and samples, and typically the composer would incorporate their assumed name into the list of samples. This primitive precursor to the modern sampler opened the way for Gravis to enter the market, because the requirements matched the capabilities of

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2478-421: The instrument, leading to a faster attack for loud passages. As memory became cheaper, it became possible to use multisampling; instead of a single recording of an instrument being played back faster or slower to reproduce other pitches, the original instrument could be sampled at regular intervals to cover regions of several adjacent notes ( splits ) or for every note. This provides a more natural progression from

2537-503: The late-1980s, however, samplers have featured specifications at least as good as CDs . By the late 1990s, the huge increases in computer processor speed permitted the widespread development of software synthesizers and software samplers . The vast storage capacity of modern computers was ideally suited to sample-based synthesis, and many samplers have thus migrated to software implementations or been superseded by new software samplers. ESS Technology ESS Technology Incorporated

2596-446: The lower to the higher registers ; lower notes don't sound dull, and higher notes don't sound unnaturally bright. It is also possible to sample the same note at several different levels of intensity, reflecting the fact that both volume and timbre change with playing style. For instance, when sampling a piano, 3 samples per key can be made; soft, medium and with force. Every possible volume in between can be made by amplifying and blending

2655-545: The maximum of 32-voice polyphony. The polyphony level is software-programmable, so the programmer can choose the appropriate value to best match the application. Advanced sound effects such as reverberation and chorus are not supported in hardware. However, software simulation is possible; a basic "echo" effect can be simulated with additional tracks, and some trackers can program effects using additional hardware voices as accumulators. The UltraSound offers MIDI playback by loading instrument patches into adapter RAM located on

2714-421: The model to be sufficiently expressive, it is therefore necessary that multisamples be made across both pitch and force of playing. A more flexible sample-based synthesis design allowing the user to record arbitrary waveforms to form a sound's basic timbre is called a sampler . Early samplers were very expensive, and typically had low sample rates and bit depth , resulting in grainy and aliased sound. Since

2773-522: The need for the TSR. The application programmer can choose to preload all patches from disk, resizing as necessary to fit into the UltraSound's on-board RAM, or have the middleware track the patch change events and dynamically load them on demand. This latter strategy, while providing better sound quality, introduces a noticeable delay when loading patches, so most applications just preload a predefined set. Each application can have its own UltraMID.INI containing

2832-615: The original UltraSound enabled Advanced Gravis to license the new GFA1 chip and software to AMD , who were trying to enter the sound chip market at the time. The chip, released in 1995, was named AMaDeus , with the AMD part number of Am78C201 and was marketed as InterWave . It was enhanced to handle up to 16 MB of onboard memory, IMA ADPCM-compressed samples, have no sample rate drop at full 32 voices, and featured additional logic to support hardware emulation of FM synthesis and simple delay-based digital sound effects such as reverb and chorus. It

2891-639: The rear side of the card, although early and now very rare GUS PnP cards did not have the Synergy logo). The card features 1 MB of sound ROM, no onboard RAM (although it can be expanded to 8 MB with two 30-pin SIMMs), and an ATAPI CD-ROM interface. A 'Pro' version adds 512 kB of on-board RAM required for compatibility with the GUS Classic. In 2014, a RAM adapter for the 72-pin SIMM was produced by retro-computer enthusiasts that made it possible to install 16 MB of RAM on

2950-526: The samples. For sample-based models of instruments like the Rhodes piano , this multisampling is very important. The timbre of the Rhodes changes drastically from left to right on the keyboard, and it varies greatly depending on the force with which the key is struck. The lower registers bark , while the higher range has a more bell-like sound. The bark will be more distinct if the keys are struck with force. For

3009-451: The sounds must be downloaded to onboard RAM prior to playback. Sound compression algorithms such as IMA ADPCM are not supported, so compressed samples must be decompressed prior to loading. The sound quality of the GF1 is not constant and depends on the selected level of polyphony. A CD-quality 44.1 kHz sample rate is maintainable with up to 14-voice polyphony; the sample rate progressively deteriorates until 19.2 kHz at

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3068-566: The user had to patch the games by replacing the existing sound drivers with the UltraSound versions provided on the installation CD. Also, the UltraSound required two DMA channels for full-duplex operation, and 16-bit channels were generally faster, so many users chose to use them, but this led to errors for games that used the DOS/4GW DOS extender, which was common in the UltraSound's era. The two principal software sound emulators included with software package were: The great potential of

3127-450: The user-side, the Sound Blaster emulation was especially hard to get right out of the box, and this resulted in a substantially high number of product returns at the store level and thus soured the retail channel on the product. Bundled software was refined over time, but Gravis could not distribute updates effectively. The company itself also created its own trouble. When Gravis's list of promised supporting game titles failed to materialize,

3186-593: Was compatible with CS4231 codec installed in the UltraSound MAX or 16-bit recording daughterboard for the UltraSound Classic. The sound "patch set" was reworked from a collection of individual instrument .PAT files to a unified .FFF/.DAT sound bank format, resembling SoundFont , which could be either ROM or RAM based. There were 4 versions of the sound bank: a full 16-bit 4 MB with 8-bit downsampled 2 MB version, and 16-bit 2 MB (different sample looping ) with 8-bit downsampled 1 MB version. A converter utility, GIPC,

3245-401: Was expensive and samples had to be as short and as few as possible. This was achieved by looping a part of the sample (often a single wave), and then using a volume envelope curve to make the sound fade away. An amplifying stage would translate key velocity into gain so that harder playing would translate into louder playback. In some cases key velocity also modulates the attack time of

3304-409: Was first developed, most affordable consumer synthesizers could not record arbitrary samples, but instead formed timbres by combining pre-recorded samples from ROM before routing the result through analog or digital filters . These synthesizers and their more complex descendants are often referred to as ROMplers . Sample-based instruments have been used since the Computer Music Melodian ,

3363-613: Was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer , a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Mozer , Forrest Mozer's son, and Joe Costello , the former manager of National Semiconductors Digitalker line of talking chips. Costello left soon after the formation and started Cadence Designs with his former boss from National. Fred Chan VLSI designer and software engineer, in Berkeley, California , joined in 1985, and took over running

3422-540: Was named "Sound Buddy". An OEM version of UltraSound Classic produced by Synergy, with 512 – 1024 kB of RAM. It features AT-BUS CD-ROM interfaces following Sony, Mitsumi and MKE/Panasonic standards. This is the only Gravis sound card with a green circuit board . It is similar to a few card clones, including the Primax SoundStorm Wave (model Sound M-16B) and the AltraSound. Released in 1996,

3481-610: Was provided for making .FFF/.DAT banks out of .PAT/.INI collections. The reference card contained a 1 MB μ-law ADPCM compressed sound ROM, which contained basic General MIDI voices and sound samples to help FM emulation, and 2 slots for RAM expansion through 30-pin SIMMs . The IWSBOS emulator was reworked to include Mega-Em features such as General MIDI emulation, and the SBOS kernel was included in Windows 95 drivers to provide emulation in

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