First post, by HunterZ
- Rank
- l33t++
I was just thinking about this and thought I'd write a post about it in case anyone cares:
I've been looking into the issue of MT-32 games in VDMSound a bit over the past week or two, and I remembered having a minor argument about soundfonts and MT-32 games with someone on the VOGONS forums. I just realized that the VDMSound FAQ explains better (with a table) what I was trying to say:
http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/faq/#badmidi
Also, I've found a few soundfonts (such as Creative's/E-mu's 4MB soundfont and one on thesoundsite that is called something like "GM GS MT32") that have MT-32 banks embedded in them, but at bank number 127. I haven't found a way to make it the active bank, so the only way I've been able to test them with old games is to open them up in Vienna Soundfont Studio and manually change the bank of each of the instruments and the drumset from 127 to 0. What I've found is that it doesn't end up sounding a whole lot better than VDMSound's MT32->GM mapping because a lot of games try to reprogram the MT32 using SysEx messages, and (as the VDMSound FAQ says) there isn't a good way to deal with that (someone needs to make an software synthesizer that emulates the MT-32 or something)
I guess there isn't enough interest in this these days, since even MIDI as a whole isn't taken very seriously for anything these days.