Hacker News Reader

Did you? Second Reality worked fine on a Sound Blaster, and sounded only marginally different/better on a Gravis if at all. It was somewhat later than that, roughly around winter 1994-1995, that some demos started to work with the GUS only for music or used larger wave samples to make use of its RAM.

View on HN

The gus offloads audio processing, whereas the sb16 requires more work from the cpu. Hence, the 3d scene at the end of Second Reality should be smoother on gus assuming a typical system of the era, e.g. 486.

This is true, but it's a small difference. It took only about 10% of a 486's CPU time to mix four to eight channels of wavetable audio. You'd never be able to notice or measure if that 3d scene was running at 11 fps instead of 10.

I believe I had read that the GUS was preferable for Second Reality, and coming from the Amiga it seemed like the cooler hardware, so that’s what I bought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com