Rex Nebular 😁

I thought the AdLib soundtrack was decent until I got an MT-32. It was like Vangelis was paying me a visit.

I have a soft spot for Legend games, IFs included -- it's rare when in-house composers are that much involved in the game design. Many of their AdLib transcriptions are enjoyable, but the MT-32 truly shines in Gateway 2, Xanth, Hoboken... Arfing Dog (does anyone know his real name?) was one heck of an underrated composer. Props to Eric Heberling as well.

I never played Legend games. I was always fascinated by graphics and didn't touch text adventures (even if those by Legend were some sort of mixture). That means I also have never listened to the soundtracks of any of those games. Can I find the MT-32 MIDIs anywhere? Do you have any recordings, Kaminari?

That's one of the oddities of their text adventures, and a much overlooked feature -- immersing the player through both a great soundtrack and a terrific parser. It may sound weird at first (just imagine having ambient tracks in Infocom games) but when you dive into Gateway 2, it all makes sense. Multimedia at its finest!

I did a few quick 'n' dirty recordings some months ago, but it's easy to extract the MIDs from the resources.

Eric the Unready
Gateway 2
Superhero League of Hoboken
Companions of Xanth 01
Companions of Xanth 02

Legend's later GM offerings (Death Gate, Mission Critical, Shannara, Callahan) are mighty fine too.

Right, MT-32 was primary choice for some Legend games. They even had instructions in the manual on how to connect MT-32 to PC. Once again, their Soundblaster music was not too bad either. Unfortunately, Eric the Unready freezes on Swamp Trek level with MT-32 music. I think the bug affected only CD version but I haven't verified that yet.

Indeed, Legend Ent games definitely have fantastic soundtrack for mt32. It was worth improving emulation to get that working in dosbox.
Munt, though, still has some room for improvement here.

If I wanted to show how good LAPC-I/CM-32 can be against Adlib/SB/SB16 I would use Lure Of The Temptress. This game shows the biggest difference. But it also shows the biggest difference when comparing LAPC-I to MT-32. You need LAPC-I or CM-32L for this game, not MT-32 😀

["Alkarion"]

Wing Commander is another game where I can't decide which version I like most.

How did you get it to work in WC? I tried the Munt emulator and it works *techincally*, but it slows down the game extremely and varies tempos like crazy. If I use the ROMs in a patch CVS version of DosBox (eg. gulikoza's DOSBoxcvs-051202) a lot of the instuments go missing. I also tried canadacow's version, here I get sound, but very off pitch.

Can anyone help? Thanks

How did you get it to work in WC?

He probably used a real MT-32.

Thread resurrection alert!

So I was looking through here and saw people comparing games with their adlib support versus their MT-32 support and which is better.

I'd like to add my own cents to this old discussion. 😀

Zeliard - great Action RPG, I beat it back in the day as a kid and actually booted it up on my old Tandy 1000 w/adlib card in it over Thanksgiving to see if it still worked and it does. Well, anyways, I was always EXTREMELY fond of it's soundtrack in Adlib--it is one of the best I've ever heard to this day.

So I loaded it up on my MT-32 and, I have to say, I think it actually sounds quite a bit better on the Adlib! I think it has less to do with composition, as both versions contain the same sheet music but more to do with the arrangement of instruments.

They picked better instruments for the Adlib version of the songs versus the MT-32. For instance, the second town has dreamy music in Adlib but more of a screechy grating tune in MT-32. The only difference is the instruments. Try it and you'll see. 😀

I think the moral here is not all old (1987-1992) games sound best in MT-32, though most do, there are exceptions to the rule.