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What games contained OPL instrument patches for all General MIDI instruments?

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First post, by Hisymak

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Hello!
I'm looking for DOS games which supported standard MIDI files playback through OPL2 / OPL3 synthesizer and therefore contained OPL instrument patches for all General MIDI instruments, either inside the game executable, or in an external file dedicated for this or inside their resource archive. Mostly these games contained a 175 or 256 - entry table of entries in SBI (or some other) format merged together. (Contrarily some mostly older games used their dedicated format for OPL music, which contained the OPL instrument patches directly inside the music file itself, like CMF, IMF, ADL and other formats).

So far I know anout these games and the different formats they use:
- Hocus Pocus, ROTT v1.2: Table of 11-byte entries in SBI format, plus percussion mapping table. Stored inside game executable.
- ROTT v1.3: Table of 12-byte entries (SBI format plus one byte for fixed note number, used for percussion instruments). Without percussion mapping table. Stored inside game executable.
- Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior (probably also NAM, Blood): Table of 13-byte entries (SBI format plus one byte for fixed note number and one unknown byte). Stored in .TMB files inside the resource archive.
- Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Strife (probably also Raptor): Table of 36-byte entries (custom format which supports up to 2 voices per instrument and fine tuning of the second voice). Stored in GENMIDI lump inside .WAD resource archive.

I also found that some games used very similar or exactly same instrument patches. I could divide them into these groups:
- Hocus Pocus, ROTT v1.3: produced by "The Fat Man", seem exactly same for both games. I've also heard they were used in Windows MIDI playback and many other games.
- ROTT v1.2: probably by Lee Jackson. These patches are incomplete - there are only patches for instruments which were really used in the game's music, for other instruments there's always same dummy/fallback patch.
- Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, NAM: probably by Apogee/3D Realms. They are very similar (or probably exactly same) across these games.
- Blood: has its unique patches.
- Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Raptor: use very similar patches, but there are slight (and noticeable) differences between them.

So any other games like this you know, the format they use, and the author of the patches (and similarities to other games)?

Reply 2 of 3, by gerwin

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Hisymak wrote:

I'm looking for DOS games which supported standard MIDI files playback through OPL2 / OPL3 synthesizer and therefore contained OPL instrument patches for all General MIDI instruments

Actually most games that support general midi in DOS have a fallback option to throw the midi at the FM synthesizer. All games with the Miles Sound System for example.
I had a few of these Midi to FM conversion banks in my humble FMBtool bank converter project, but there are more comprehensive tools around.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 3 of 3, by Hisymak

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Stretch wrote:

Check out the source code for ADLMIDI for other examples.

Thanks for advice! So I looked at it and got surprised there are so many games to choose from, I've never played most of them.
But on the webpage of this project ( http://bisqwit.iki.fi/source/adlmidi.html ) I could not find any downloads for executables for Windows, there are only links to the source code, which is useless for me. Fortunately I found a link to exe download in description of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyMc2xLrolk which seems to be some outdated version, but at least something.
So I tried it out and found out it does not work very well for me - the sound is "cracking" like the CPU is not fast enough to render the sound (checked and it consumed 100%), but I have no problem at all with OPL emulation in Dosbox or ZDoom. Any tips to fix this? Tried out all available parameters.
And one more thing - found out it wrongly plays MIDIs with Doom banks (14). The music is kinda messed up and it seems it only plays a single voice of the double-voice instruments, which is the MOST important/useful feature of the Doom sound system.
And I could not find directly the banks for "The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall", but I found out the music sounds very similar wit banks from "Blood". So it confirms many games share either exactly same banks or there are very slight differences/customizations. Any chance to get the banks directly from Daggerfall?

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