First post, by Galve2000
Hello everyone,
A friend of mine pointed me to this site in hopes that I might get a work-related windows-only app on my Mac and instead I found something infinately more interesting:
a ton of information about how I might play my old Sierra adventure games in their full General MIDI glory on a newer system, which is something I haven't been able to do since I gave up my last PC with an ISA slot many, many years ago.
once upon a time I purchased a Turtle Beach MultiSound Monterey and was absolutely floored by jump in sound quality from by Sound Blaster Pro.
I've been doing some research and figured that a good bet for good Wave-table-synthesis MIDI card for my vintage games would be the TB Montego II, but the more research I do, the more I realize that this is a card that only emulates DOS support (which is the same infuriating nonsense I had to deal with in the Monterey era) -- but I found one on eBay for US$7 including shipping -- so I figured what the hell...
and btw.. these TB cards are really fussy creatures for sure, but the resulting sound quality can blow you away.. so it's largely worth it IMO.
my questions and concerns:
I know that XP has native Vortex II support but this driver does not support A3D -- which sounds quite nice although the last "modern" PC game I played was Siberia (a pretty underwhelming adventure game, but that's for another post entirely) and I doubt any of teh games from the era that interest me support this feature anyway, so its not really a loss.
I don’t really need some of the newer capabilities that these sound cards offer -- I purchased the card for its wavetable-synthesis MIDI capabilities hoping that it would at least approximate the Monterey in quality when playing my old DOS and Win31/95 adventure games.
the things that worry me:
1. B/C this is a modern system -- At press time, it is running Vista, but I intend to create an XP partition in the next few days where I will be running dosbox and all my old DOS games -- I am concerned that the XP Vortex II driver will not run the MIDI capabilities of the card properly and instead dumb everything down to some crappy FM-Synth-quality SoundBlaster emulation.
2. will I be able to run both my onboard stigmata audio card and the new TB card in DOSBox, or will DosBox go bonkers at the presence of 2 cards? back in the day, the old Monterey was not capable of playing digital audio (WAV files for example) in DOS, you needed an Adlib or SB card to take care of that. While I hope the Montego II no longer has this limitation, somehow I feel I won’t be so lucky.
3. Reading up on everything the past few days I am a little confused about all of these audio emulators available for DosBox. My concern is that if I need to use the Montego II’s audio emulator to play DOS games, the TB emulator will not interface well with the available DOSBOX emulators and I will once again be stuck with a crappy sounding game that is reverting to SB Pro quality MIDI 🙁
or worse, b/c I am using dosbox, I am limited to the same kind of crappy software wave-table-synthesis I already get with my modern onboard audio card. don’t get me wrong.. it sounds OK.. I guess..
of course, maybe since DOSBox for Windows is a native Windows app, I won’t need to use the TB DOS emulator to get MIDI working and will only need the DosBox emulator to get the sound quality I’m looking for.
Finally, from what I understand, my old Monterey had a Rio wavetable daughterboard built into the package which my new Montego II will not. I wonder how much of the incredible sound in my old sierra adventure games was actually due to the addition of the Rio daughterboard (which from what I understand does not work with the Montego II, although I intend to test this for myself just to make sure.)
in the meantime, I am scouting eBay and craigslist for Cancun-FX daughterboard which play well with the Montego II.
I have over the past few years played through many of my old sierra games, with the notable exception of Kings Quest VI CD (which I absolutely cannot stand the site of in DOS mode -- the Windows version of the poor game even runs poorly in Win95, if you can believe that.) However, the sound quality in these games, using modern, non- (hardware) wave-table synthesis cards just does not compare to what you get when using a Monterey.
I think playing these games with a Monterey spoiled me and now I must suffer the consequences. I hope that by the end of all this I will be able to play some of these games with the audio as it was meant to be experienced.
I’m sorry for the length of this post -- it contains about a weeks worth of posts that I meant to write as I read through this forum.
I would greatly appreciate any tips you might have (particularly those with an older turtle beach card in newer system) for getting this card running in DosBox (or if possible in Windows Vista) as well as any tips for a recommended daughterboard for my Montego II for running older sierra games.
thanks in advance for taking the time to reply.
cmm3
