Editing Gravis UltraSound (section)

===Sample RAM===
The UltraSound offers MIDI playback by loading instrument patches into adapter RAM located on the card, not unlike how instruments are stored in [[Read-only memory|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 [[Loop (music)|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 a General MIDI-compatible mapping scheme. [[Windows 95]] and [[Windows 98|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]] [[Terminate-and-stay-resident program|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 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 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 [[Sampler (musical instrument)|digital samplers]]. Some games — including ''[[Doom (1993 video game)|Doom]]'', ''[[Doom II]]'' and ''[[Duke Nukem 3D]]'' — come with their own optimized UltraMID.INI.

The UltraSound cards gained great popularity in the PC tracker music community. The tracker format was originally developed on the [[Commodore International|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 (file format)|MOD]], [[S3M]], and later [[XM (mod format)|XM]]. The format stores the notes and instruments digitally in the file instead of relying on a sound card to reproduce the instruments. A tracker [[module file|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 the GF1 chip ideally. The problem with other sound cards playing these formats was that they had to [[downmixing|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 the demo scene support could be a sales booster, and they gave away 6000 cards for free{{Citation needed|date=September 2011}} to the most famous scene groups and people in the scene.

{{See also|Tracker (music software)|l1=Tracker}}