GUS Music in Dosbox

Very rough page outline on how to make the midi music in UFO/TFTD sing.

What is GUS?

A brief and ill-informed explanatory stub:

The Gravis Ultra Sound was a music synthesiser that many old video games used for playback of midi music. The GUS provided a quality of sound that was and still is richer than what is available through standard Adlib/Soundblaster midi playback.

Dosbox, which X-COM UFO and Terror From the Deep rely on to run on modern day computers, is able to emulate the Gravis Ultra Sound. However, it is not able to emulate the GUS by default and requires GUS patches to run.

Setting up Dosbox

Brief stub:

• Obtain GUS patches from the interwebs (a precompiled set)

• Point Dosbox to patches
  • Show Dosbox where to find patches (mount separate drive or keep in game directory)
  • Set ULTRASND environment variable in Dosbox to point to where Patches are kept in last step.
  • BLASTER variables too?
  • Sticking these steps in the dosbox.conf file to automate things

• Run game sound setup for UFO/TFTD (or any other game) to set Synth/MIDI playback to GUS
• Enjoy music