The Gravis Ultrasound soundcard series was the first one to offer hardware wavetable synthesis for PCs with for consumer prices. The original Ultrasound series was based on Advanced Gravis' own GF1 pipeline processor, which was capable of producing 32 voice polyphony and apply frequency shifting (with interpolation), amplitude modulation and panning independently to each voice. When this card was originally introduced in 1992, it could beat all other cards in the market hands down. Unfortunately, Creative Labs's Sound Blaster series had become a de facto standard and most people didn't feel like taking the risk of buying an Ultrasound. Because of this, the Ultrasound was mostly supported by people who knew that the card was technically superior and weren't concerned of scarce software support. The PC demoscene consists of such people, and an Ultrasound became an essential piece of hardware for any serious demoscener as many demos had support for the Ultrasound.

Being somewhat involved in the PC demoscene, I bought a Gravis Ultrasound MAX in 1994 to replace my old SB Pro and fell instantly in love with the card. The sounds it produced were crystal clear and played in perfect polyphony while using nearly zero CPU time. I bought an Ultrasound Extreme in early 1997 to replace my MAX, mainly to get better software support in DOS and Win95. After Gravis announced their withdrawal from the sound card market, I decided to supplement my collection of GF1 Ultrasounds with a GUS Classic and a GUS Ace since people were selling them at ridiculously low prices.

When I stumbled onto Megaman X's soundcard museum while reading olskool.org, I thought it might be a nice idea to wrap up a webpage on the GF1 series. I fired up my text editor and here we are.