The card fried at some point because it was so heavy that it bent and hit the bottom of the PC's chassis.
Later I got a GUS Extreme, which had 1MB of RAM on the board already and an ESS AudioDrive chip. Though I experimented far less with this card.
We also had their gamepad at some point.
Originally I was just using it as a Soundblaster, but in the last few weeks added Waveblaster, Adlib, and Gravis Ultrasound support. It's been a lot of fun learning how the GUS works and hearing how distinctively different it is from other sound hardware of that era.
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.
...it's a breakout board for an OOP chip that's impossible to find?
You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?
Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.
If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.
Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.
At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.
Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.