Last time I played Everquest, it was on Win10 with a modern nVidia card (GTX960), Audigy2 ZS and a Core i3 CPU, so it plays nice with modern configs. I'm having a bit of difficulty tracking down what's different with the Takproject and Titanium clients, but it looks like the current client actually wants Win7 and an Athlon64 - though both of the video cards you listed will work. (I remember running it on a P2/266 with a Voodoo Banshee, and it ran well enough; we upgraded that box to a P2/450 with a Voodoo3 3500, and it ran like stink. Kinda nuts now, ya?)

AFAIK, all the music in the game now is PCM rather than MIDI, so you probably just want the cleanest-sounding card you can find. AWE64 would be fine, so would any Live or Audigy variant. It was MIDI at one time, though, and for that, the CT3980 would be great, so would an AWE64 Gold.

I remember watching a friend play it on a K6 with Voodoo2. That wasn't pretty.

It would be interesting to hear how it runs on various old cards.

So I never really played Everquest back in the day (or the present), but I started doing a bit of research on the sound front of things after reading your post as I do enjoy MIDI quite a bit. The small bit of music that I heard was... actually quite amazing, really. I would have to wonder whether or not Everquest could be considered the pinnacle of MIDI music in PC gaming. It certainly hit very late to be a game that used MIDI.

I picked up the 422 (!) MIDI file archive from the EverQuest MIDI project and fired up the main theme (Intro) - or what I believe to be the intro - and it pretty much choked my equipment. The composer really did compose in a late era of MIDI as it uses a solid 16 channels and knocks down the polyphony door. I am fairly certain you would cripple a Yamaha DB50XG if you tried to play back some of this music on it. As I understand it, that DB50XG has 32 voice polyphony. Watching the MIDI playback voice count in MIDI Player with playing "Norrath Beckons," it looks like it is averaging 25-30, has some areas that clear 40, and tops out at around 70 (!)

What does the box/manual say for recommended sound? Do you have it? Where did you read that the game was designed for the AWE32? Is there an official interview that mentions it, or is it speculation on a forum? Based on my short experience with Everquest MIDI, the AWE32 most likely couldn't deliver what was asked of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdECvLE7mxs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3igZdXM30gE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sybFR_dI7Wg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdECvLE7mxs

https://youtu.be/7-fcwnqbp2w

These are an example of some of the music that I want to hear from Jay's target hardware. That Based uploader guy has a lot of other videos, and I feel like his uploads with emulated soundfonts are the best we've heard so far. I'd just like to nail it down 100%.

By changing your systems MIDI soundfont, you can recreate the AWE32 Soundblaster sound which is how the music was meant to be heard

https://www.project1999.com/forums/archive/in … hp/t-81207.html

It's all hearsay at this point, but I've reached out to Jay Barbeau to find out what his target/platform was at the time. I want to hear what he heard while he was performing/optimizing it.

I can't seem to find an original/kunark manual pdf link that isn't long dead. [edit: correction: all manuals only specify DirectX compatible soundcard, but based on the era, that means awe32/awe64, sblive came later.]

Maybe someone else here could just load up the Project1999 / Takproject client and record them. idk. I'm working on ebay listings so I can get it done right.

Where did you read that the game was designed for the AWE32?

All speculation. Hopefully I hear back from Jay and I can do this all right.