I just tested - with the ALS100 based soundcard in my megapc so the MPU is an UART one and the system is a 486slc33 one ,(386DX40 speed more or less) and same 5.0.19 game version
- I went inside the bar and saved - the bar theme music was playing fine
- I loaded in the same location inside the bar - no music
- I exit the bar and the ship cutscene plays - it has music
- after the cutscene I enter the bar again - no music

If I exit the game completely and load the save the music plays inside the bar , the music plays on the ship cutscene but entering the bar again there is no music again

so definitely something going on here....

edit:
it seems that behavior is fixed in the ULTIMATE TALKIE edition of the game , no music issues on this one 😀

I remember an issue with changing the music device used by a save game.
i.e. if you loaded a save which was using adlib output, you could either get adlib sound output OR silence, but never say roland output.
I don't remember if this was an issue with an early version but I kind of remember having the problem even with MI2.

EDIT: I just tried my MI1 edition (scumm 5.0.19) with my MPu401 emu and the behavior is as follows:
* If I save a game using gameblaster sound and then restart MI with roland sound, I get roland music until I try to restore the save, after which I get silence.
* If I save a game using roland sound and then restart MI with roland sound, I get roland music incl after restoring the save game.

So, was your save using roland music ?

my tests were with roland music
do not restart the game, just save and load again with roland music, do you get music when loading?

keropi wrote on 2022-02-13, 19:07:

my tests were with roland music
do not restart the game, just save and load again with roland music, do you get music when loading?

The answer is, surprisingly, "sometimes".
On my first try to do exactly that I definitely got music (the track from scumm bar started again from the beginning, not at the point of the save).
However I tried to reload a second time and I got silence. And then I reproduced what you say: the bar is silent even if I reenter, but lechuck's ship cutscene got music.
Further reloads do not get the music back, I have to exit the game.

It seems that the _first_ time I reload the save I get music, but further reloads within the same session lose the music. On every reload the game just sends an ALL NOTES OFF.

Note: I am using VBox, not real hardware.

yeah definitely a game bug at least in that version
IMHO the good news is that ultimate talkie edition does not suffer from this , it is a very enjoyable version to play since the voice acting is very good

Yeah looks like a bug rather than a emu issue. If I save within the ship cutscene I can reload as many times as I want and I always get the music back.

Thanks all -- sounds like there is no point in testing it further with different HW combinations, as you guys were able to reproduce it with other, quite dissimilar HW.

Thanks for the talkie version tip, I'll give it a try -- need to arrange some space onto my hard disk first, though 😀