I am writing this post mainly for informational purposes only. I have recently been playing an old game by the name of Master of Magic. The music and sound effects while working sufficiently, do not seem to match what were originally played when using an older card. I am told VDM sound is used to alleviate this somewhat but the differences remain. Several instruments seem to be wrong and if the truth be known, the end result comes out more than a little on the lame side (sort of like a high school marching band compared against a full blown symphony orchestra). This game is not the only one. As an example Darklands sword fights sound more like a couple of fine wine glasses being brought together in a toast than metal clashing against metal (the original definitely did NOT sound like that all those years ago).

I recently found a couple of old programs that are capable of extracting Sound, Music, and other things like Bitmaps from the LBX Data files. Much to my suprise, after extracting the music into XMIDI format and then converting it over to MIDI; I found that Windows Media Player and another player known as Winamp played the Music and effects EXACTLY the way I remember them.

I am still kind of confused as to why DosBox and the game itself have difficulty re-creating the music on Microprose games. I am making a guess that it has to do with the internal drivers that the game is attempting to use. I firmly believe that they were meant to help the older Soundblaster cards and others like them to play the music correctly. Naturally with the more advanced cards not needing any help, the music becomes somewhat distorted into what we hear today. This is not a problem with dosbox, but rather with old internal game drivers trying to do something that is no longer needed.

Does anyone else have any ideas??