Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd. HEAD OFFICE: 3750 North Fraser Way, #101 Burnaby, BC, Canada V5J 5E9 Tech Support: Tel (604) 431-1807 Fax (604) 451-9358 WWW: http://www.gravis.com Email: sound@gravis.com _______________________________________________________________________ README for the UltraSound Plug & Play Driver / Software Installation Version 2.2 software -September 10, l997- _______________________________________________________________________ Thank you for choosing the UltraSound Plug & Play. Here is the last minute information for these drivers: Latest Drivers -------------- The latest drivers for your UltraSound Plug & Play card are always available for free download from the Gravis Web site www.gravis.com. Plug & Play Problems -------------------- The number 1 difficulty users have with installing the UltraSound are resource conflicts. Plug & Play is supposed to allocate resources without conflicts automatically. However many Plug & Play implementations can not do this properly, especially when there are many devices installed in the system. Your UltraSound effectively has the following 5 devices: Synthesizer/CODEC (Music/Digital Sound Support) Sound Blaster Emulation MPU-401 General MIDI Emulation ATAPI IDE CD-ROM Interface Joystick/Game Port Just disabling one of the above devices greatly reduces the chances of conflicts occurring. If you are having resource conflicts you should disable all devices you do not need. In particular most users have no need for the IDE interface since they already have 2 IDE interfaces in their system. You UltraSound may have even come with the CD-ROM interface disabled. To disable devices, run the supplied PNPCFG utility. To do this you must be in DOS (Windows 95 users must restart in MS-DOS mode), then place the driver disk in the drive and typing: A:\PNPCFG assuming the disk is in drive A:. From here on the program is fairly self explanatory. If you make any changes and are running Windows 95 we strongly recommend you re-run the UltraSound driver SETUP after Windows 95 starts up again as Windows 95 tends to become confused by these changes. DOS/Windows 3.x users: Any changes you make with this utility will not show up in the "Manual Setup" of the DOS/Windows 3.x Setup program. However if you use the "Automatic Setup" option any changes made with PnPCfg will take effect. Sounds Looping in Windows ------------------------- If you try and play a wave file and you find that part of the sound plays over and over again, instead of playing the whole sound once, your UltraSound is in conflict with another hardware device. You will need to select a different IRQ. For DOS/Windows 3.x, exit Windows and run SETUP from your UltraSound directory. This will allow you to select a different IRQ for your UltraSound Synth/CODEC device. For Windows 95, start System Properties (Start->Settings->Control Panel, System), select the Device Manager tab. If necessary, double click on Sound, Video and Game Controllers to open it. You can then open the UltraSound Synth/CODEC device and manually change its properties/resources. More than one UltraSound Plug & Play in the Same Machine -------------------------------------------------------- It is not possible to have more than one UltraSound Plug & Play card in the same machine. The Plug & Play BIOS/Windows 95 will not be able to separate the cards and the drivers are not designed to handle more than one card. IWSBOS (Sound Blaster Emulator) in a Windows 3.x/95 DOS BOX ----------------------------------------------------------- IWSBOS works fine in a Windows DOS box, however you can not unload it from within the DOS box. To unload it you must close the DOS box. MIDI IN timing problems in Cakewalk ----------------------------------- On some systems, recording from a MIDI keyboard, notes may become bunched up together or note lengths may be incorrect. This issue is still under investigation, however switching from a RAM based patch set to the ROM set may correct the problem. MIDI IN Crashing System ----------------------- On a number of systems, if you have nothing plugged into the game/MIDI port and try and use the MIDI in port, the system may crash. You can overcome this problem by either plugging a joystick / gamepad / MIDI keyboard into the port or configuring your application to not use the MIDI IN port. Exporting .PAT files with Sound Forge ------------------------------------- You can not export wave files from Sound Forge in the Gravis .PAT format, then run GIPC to convert them to the .FFF format. This is because you can not edit important paramters such as envelope, loop points etc. from within Sound Forge. You can load existing .PAT files which contain only a single waveform and save out any changes you make to that waveform, however this is of little use. Changes since Version 2.0 ------------------------- * The gameport will now stay enabled when restarting Windows 95 in MS-DOS mode. * The Windows 3.x properties page now fits on a 640x480 screen and comes up in the centre instead of partly off the screen. * In the Windows 3.x drivers section of the control panel the UltraSound driver now has a proper description. * On some systems, the properties page would appear, then immediately disappear. This has been corrected. * Games that use DirectX 5 are now supported. * Additions to this documentation. Special Credits --------------- Jean-Paul Mikkers for the Public Domain MOD player source code in which our PLAY.EXE and ETEKMOD.DRV are based upon. David Van Dromme for his relentless BETA testing and support. Brian Swango for his non-stop support for us and our products. [End of File]