GUS Music in Dosbox

Very rough page outline on how to make the midi music in dos versions of UFO/TFTD sing with the help of Dosbox's Gravis Ultrasound emulation.

Dosbox, which X-COM UFO and Terror From the Deep rely on to run their original Dos versions on modern day computers, is able to emulate the Gravis Ultra Sound. However, due to incompatibilities in licenses, does not come packaged with GUS patches by default. Attempting to play audio through GUS emulation will generally result in silence until sound patches are provided.

What is GUS?

The Gravis Ultra Sound or GUS was a sound card that is able to used samples of real world sounds for its instruments, allowing for rich playback of MIDI music.

For more information on this sound card and its eventual demise you can refer to the Gravis Ultrasound article on Wikipedia.

GUS Patches

Refer to huggybaby2's ready-to-use Ultrasnd folders:

http://www.dosgames.com/forum/about10574.html

Obtain a copy of the pre-compiled patches in the post above. Instructions on how to set it up are available there, alternately follow the instructions here.

Note: For those concerned with the legality of obtaining the patches, the GUS patches are available to download via the Gravis FTP site. The file you can get through the above link has the patches pre-compiled and ready to go.

Setting up Dosbox with the GUS patches

• Unpack the patches and you should get two folders: ULTRASND411 and ULTRASNDPPL161. Pick one to use, either will work fine.
  • Optional: Keep them as they are or rename the one you want to use to ULTRASND

• Store these folders somewhere. If you have your Dos game stored in a folder, say DOSGAMES\, copy them into there. Alternately, copy them directly into the same folder as the game you want to use the patches with.

• Keeping the patches in the same folder as your game means less mounting or complicated file paths, but requires that you make copies of the patches for each game.
• Keeping the patches in a separate folder will require that you either keep them in the folder that Dosbox will mount as your C:, or you can get Dosbox to mount a new drive just for the patches. Either way, make sure you know what path Dosbox will need to be able to find the patches.

• The next step is to alter Dosbox's configuration file to enable its GUS support. For a normal Dosbox configuration, you can edit the main Dosbox .conf file. If you have a special .conf file made specifically for your game or have downloaded a game from a place like Steam or GOG with the game pre-packaged with a copy of Dosbox, you will need to open its respective .conf file.

• When editing the Dosbox .conf file, go to the [GUS] heading

• Alter the line gus=false to gus=true if it isn't already set.
• Alter ultradir=C:\ULTRASND and point it to the directory where you can find the patches.

Note: You can also use the SET command to set this environment variable from the Dosbox command line interface or enter it into the [autoexec] section at the end the .conf file.

This will set up your copy of Dosbox to use its GUS emulation with games that support it.

Setting up UFO/TFTD to use the GUS

TODO

• Adjusting the music settings (with screenshots!)
• Using the Steam release? How to run the sound setup?
• Running sound setup via command line interface through Dosbox

When you launch the game, it should now start playing midi music via GUS emulation. Enjoy the difference. Note that one side effect is that the game may take a few seconds longer to start than usual as it needs to load the audio patch. A small price to pay for better music.