Yup that's it pretty much.

To cover all you bases I would get:

- Sound Blaster Pro 2
- MT-32 (Old)
- CM-32L
- SC-55

Not cheap to get all the parts, but once you're done you have everything you need.

d1stortion wrote:

No, he's right in that games with MIDI support were scarce during Win9x times. I was just thinking that there has to be some way to get the MS synth to play in DOS games under Win9x, and what you would get then would be closer to what some composers used compared to other contemporary (and cheap) products, and for free of course.

Well, I know Age Empires had MIDI support. But I don't know any Win 9x games that used anything besides MIDI or sampled sounds. AFAIK, most Win 9x games simply used sampled sounds.

It seems to me that midi music in games, GM, MT-32 or SC-55, whichever flavour, started to decline in popularity as CD-ROM drives became normal. At that point, they could simply run CD music tracks instead of midi based music, which removes the dependency on specific midi hardware, and (for most people) improved the quality of in-game music. I remember playing Need for Speed back in the days, with the wrong CD in the drive, and I suddenly had Iron Maiden playing in the background while racing. It was a problem when trying to view the car profiles though, as the game would request files from the actual game CD. For Win9x era gaming, I don't really think midi is a big issue, it's mainly for early to mid DOS era games that it plays a big role. To simplify things, I think that an SB16 (or Pro 2 if you can get one) with a daughterboard (Yamaha DB50/60XG or clone) would be a good way of doing it. If money isn't an issue, then having a couple of MT-32s and SC-55s would of course be awesome.

Pro 2 doesn't have a daughterboard connector...

AWE32/64 actually isn't bad considering how cheap and easy to get hold of they are. It might save you a lot of money if you're happy with it.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Them's fightin' words. Have you ever listened to Jean Michel Jarre? Kraftwerk? Depeche Mode? Nine Inch Nails? Skinny Puppy? They have ALL made great music using synthesizers. It's not the instrument you use to make your music, but rather the music itself that determines if it's quality. 😉 Of course, musical taste is a really subjective thing.

That's the spirit 😀 . Add Aphex Twin to that through, he's my favorite brand of insanity, in a good way.

I almost forgot about him. Richard D. James is a god in the world of electronic music. 😁

Speaking of which, this is one of my favorite tracks by him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4cLmbw6q0

I like that track, although my favorites are mostly the "Peel session", Analord and Drukqs songs 😀

You guys should take listen to Com Truise.

Ontopic, OP you should try BASSMIDI with different soundfonts and DOSBox. This will make it clear how different MIDI can sound. Basically, MIDI is a means of communication. It's not like a wave file or mp3, it contains the notes and other info like what organs are playing at any given time. When a MIDI file is accessed, it passes this information to the default MIDI Device which then plays the song/track according to the info on the MIDI file.

MIDI is not just limited to computers either. It is basically a protocol for communication with various devices, including keyboards, synths etc., most of which are not really recommended for DOS games, but for creating music on your computer using your synth etc.

It is even possible to create a computer network using MIDI in a similiar way to regular LAN. See MIDI Maze, an early multiplayer "FPS" on Atari ST predating Wolfenstein 3D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hSoy1S43dw .

A bit offtopic, not really a good example of electronic music, but this is funny as hell to anyone who played Fallout 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ximxe4XtU 😁

There's nothing like the awesomeness of MIDI devices. Of course, only enthusiasts can appreciate them. And then some.

LunarG wrote:

It seems to me that midi music in games, GM, MT-32 or SC-55, whichever flavour, started to decline in popularity as CD-ROM drives became normal.

Isn't that quite logical? If you have the CD space might as well use it for CD-DA without any CPU penalty. There are still caveats though; it lacks interactivity and it's not possible to quickly change tracks due to the delay, and the drive can't read any data while reading audio tracks... on the other hand, reading data on the fly was often bad news for games back in the day, so I'd still rather have CD-DA without stutter.

There are still caveats though; it lacks interactivity and it's not possible to quickly change tracks due to the delay, and the drive can't read any data while reading audio tracks.

Indeed, you can't do I-MUSE with CD audio.

Makes me think of the effort to bring imuse back to Xwing Collector Series instead of the dull, low quality, static CD-ROM tracks.
I can see Stull being sorta` cornered here with his opinion.
Yet, no matter how many synths we have, we must admit he has a point here: the majority and best sounding GM / GS tracks were written with old, real classical instruments in mind - and the composers hands were simply tied to what device was available at the time. ( I just paraphrased RFNagel's standpoint - that of a musician. 😀

No, the problem is just that the vast majority of game MIDIs do not utilize the possibilites of a decent synth. In the end MIDI is just a buzzword that for most people causes a Pavlovian response such as "cheesy artificial sounding computer music", but if you listen to a sophisticated MIDI that makes full use of a quality synth it's a quite different story.

With that said, even with simple unoptimized MIDIs good results are possible given the right tools. Or does this sound like garbage?

The keyword here is "DO NOT UTILIZE". That is the fact, either we like it or not - with all due respect, you cannot change the past, cannot change how the 2322 MIDI-supporting DOS games were written 😀 We want to be "period correct" and "intention correct", yes - but one cannot deny the X-Fi's superiority in MIDI handling in DOOM with some gigantic soundfonts loaded. Sure you have listened to Mau's recordings. But even then, you can IMAGINE something better, more faithful... closer to something "ideal", you know 😀

But I fully agree that there are awesome, genuine synth-to-the-bone compos out there, without a single traditional instrument 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yup that's it pretty much. […]
Show full quote

Yup that's it pretty much.

To cover all you bases I would get:

- Sound Blaster Pro 2
- MT-32 (Old)
- CM-32L
- SC-55

Not cheap to get all the parts, but once you're done you have everything you need.

Not to mention a Roland MPU-401AT, if one wants to use a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Or a MIDIMan one, or Musicquest.

I would suggest trading the Sound Blaster Pro 2 by a YMF OPL3-SA card. Then one gets a MPU-401 UART that can drive the Sound Canvas, and the MT-32 and CM-32L with the help of SoftMPU. These cards are cheap, have genuine OPL3 and have good sound to noise ratio.

MIDI in game music is exceptionally interesting topic.

Why MIDI was used in computer games? Because there was no enough drive space to store PCM sound many minutes long (one minute of CD-quality PCM sound takes nearly 10 Mbytes). Thus, game developers needed something to radically diminish the space taken by music files, even at the cost of compromised quality. Some developers went the tracker way: the music is separated in commands and base instrument PCM sound, and stored together. Only one note per instrument is stored as PCM, while other notes are generated on-the-fly using pitch shifting techniques. Depending on PCM quality, one tracker module can weigh from 50 Kb to few megabytes, and the output result is much device-independent. Many well-known games, from Prehistorik to Unreal, used that technique.

But the majority of developers went MIDI way. Unlike tracker music, while using MIDI you store only the commands, implying that your hardware will generate instrument sounds on-the-fly. This way, one track only takes a few dozens of kilobytes, but the result massively depends on customer's hardware. This makes composer's work much harder, because he or she should contemplate all the hardware MIDI devices that the game claims compatibility with. You may create a MIDI track that would sound perfectly on one MIDI device, but completely screwed up on another. A perfect example is X-COM: UFO Defense soundtrack, which sounds incredibly fine with OPL3 cards, but awfully with technically more advanced (!) Sound Blaster AWE32.

MIDI itself is just a protocol that allows musical electronic devices to communicate. Allows to send commands like: start note, end note, pitch bend, change instrument, etc. At first, there was no common standard on what sounds sit in which instrument number. Later, the General MIDI standard appeared, and was widely adopted. It stated which instruments reside on which instrument numbers (say, #0 is Acoustic Grand Piano, #35 is Fretless Bass etc.), which greatly ceased the existing chaos among MIDI devices.

Some developers (including Blizzard and Bullfrog) had their composers to create several versions of each MIDI track, each version aiming different devices, to achieve more adequate results.

MIDI devices usable for PC games can be divided into few large groups.

1) Yamaha OPL2/OPL3-based cards. Adlib, early Sound Blaster cards and their clones fit this category. They are not MIDI devices in fact, but can perform as such with the help of software engine, which grabs MIDI data on-the-fly and transforms it into OPL synthesizer command flow. Say, Miles Sound System middleware engine uses General MIDI timbre set for Yamaha OPL2 and OPL3 chips developed by well-known game composer George A. Sanger (The Fat Man):

If you ever saw fat.ad and fat.opl files in game directory - that's it.

2) Pre-General MIDI devices. Casio CSM-1 (or CT-460), Yamaha FB-01 (or IBM Music Feature card), Roland MT-32 (or its compatibles) fall into this category.

They all utilize their own schemes of instrument mapping, thus making a MIDI file made for one device sounding completely screwed when sent to another. Thing is that while Casio and Yamaha/IBM devices are supported by too few games, the venerable Roland MT-32 had really wide support and there are excellent soundtracks written for it. That puts a MT-32 (or something compatible - MT-100, CM-32L, CM-65, CM-500, LAPC-I) into a wishlist for an old game music lover.

3) General MIDI-compatible devices. List of these devices is really endless. Thanks to the General MIDI (GM) standard, they are compatible by the means of instrument mapping, and differ only by instrument sounds they produce. These devices divide into ISA slot cards, daughterboards and external modules.

Majority of GM devices use sample-based engine (samples are stored in ROM or loaded to RAM) to reproduce instruments. Though GM standard allows using same MIDI files for all the devices of this category, still much depends on the composer efforts to polish the output sound for one device or another. I will enlist several devices that were widely supported by game developers:

3a) ISA slot cards

- Sound Blaster AWE32 family (also SB AWE64 and SB 32)
- Gravis UltraSound family and clones
- Roland SoundCanvas family (SCC-1, SCC-1A and RAP-10)
- Yamaha XG family (SW60XG)

3b) Daughterboards

- Creative WaveBlaster family
- Roland SoundCanvas family (SCB-55, SCB-7)
- Yamaha XG family (DB50XG, DB60XG)

3c) External modules

- Roland SoundCanvas (SC-55, SC-88 etc.)
- Yamaha XG family (Yamaha MU-10, MU-15, MU-50, MU-80 etc.)

All these devices are worth getting, but notice that devices belonging to one family would produce much the same sound (say, Roland SCC-1 and Roland SC-55).

---

Later (past 1996), when HDDs became vast enough to store PCM audio, and highly effective PCM compression algorithms like MP3 and OGG appeared while CPUs got enough power for real-time decompression, the need in MIDI usage for game soundtracks rapidly faded into oblivion.

I would suggest trading the Sound Blaster Pro 2 by a YMF OPL3-SA card. Then one gets a MPU-401 UART that can drive the Sound Canvas, and the MT-32 and CM-32L with the help of SoftMPU. These cards are cheap, have genuine OPL3 and have good sound to noise ratio.

...except the tiny-weeny problem that the Yamaha is not FULLY SB-Pro compatible (there are NO 100% SB Pro compatible cards.) Certain games will lack some sfx, others sounds slightly off, a few wont work at all. Great Hierophant's posts are worth reading.

Jolaes76 wrote:

I would suggest trading the Sound Blaster Pro 2 by a YMF OPL3-SA card. Then one gets a MPU-401 UART that can drive the Sound Canvas, and the MT-32 and CM-32L with the help of SoftMPU. These cards are cheap, have genuine OPL3 and have good sound to noise ratio.

...except the tiny-weeny problem that the Yamaha is not FULLY SB-Pro compatible (there are NO 100% SB Pro compatible cards.) Certain games will lack some sfx, others sounds slightly off, a few wont work at all. Great Hierophant's posts are worth reading.

Fair enough. Luckily for me pretty much every game i play (and several amounts of others i won't) work just fine. I would like to see a list of games that don't work properly with the YMF cards.

carlostex wrote:

Not to mention a Roland MPU-401AT, if one wants to use a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Or a MIDIMan one, or Musicquest.

😊

Forgot to add that!

Another good setup (just no OPL3) is:

- AWE64 Gold with SoftMPU
- MT-32 (Old)
- CM-32L
- SC-55

The lack of OPL3 might upset some, BUT one needs to realise that there are not that many games that have no MIDI support at all. Yes there are a few, but IMO all the "big titles" have MIDI support. So it's not such a big deal to be honest.