[sys42590]

Former FastTracker II [1] user reporting in.

The Gravis Ultrasound had an incredible price to performance ratio back in the day and made high quality wavetable synthesis at "CD quality" available to the masses.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2

Edit: The fact that quite a few games supported the GUS out of the box or received patches to do so was also a well received boon on my side.

[tim-projects]

This is how I heard about it. I never had access to anything like that. The idea that you could load samples on to it was out of my reach. All I could do was midi programming on my Yamaha XG50. But it never sounded professional. Then I discovered the world of music trackers and that carried me until fruity loops came along.

[varispeed]

As someone who couldn't afford it, I always felt excluded when developers have not implemented any alternative, like if someone had plain sound blaster clone.

[rasz]

Im not familiar of any software that would do that. If anything people who bought GUS felt scammed when it turned out its Sound Blaster emulation (SBOS/Mega-Em) was somewhere between barely working and totally broken.

GUS selling point was offloading sound engine to hardware mixer, but by the time UltraSound PnP released CPUs were fast enough for fully software GM.