hifidelitygaming wrote:

Did any games specifically demand an AWE (not routing thru midi but directly accessing it)?

Plenty of games support the AWE natively (like you say, addressing it directly).

But it was never demanded. General MIDI is usually always supported. You just select whatever card you have in the setup menu.

Eradicator used AWE for sound effects instead of music.

leileilol wrote:

Eradicator used AWE for sound effects instead of music.

Not to mention the fact that Eradicator takes advantage of the "3D Positional Audio" capability of the EMU8000 for the playback of those sound-effects. This feature alone makes Eradicator an "AWE-exclusive" title, in my opinion.

There used to be a rather nice (and publicly viewable) "Eradicator w/AWE64" video on YouTube... 😉

cant you just load the soundfont set it up to use it as its normal general midi, then select gm in dk and no need to have dk see an awe32

ditto with Davros 😀 I'm wondering what things went BEYOND just using a custom soundfont that could be triggered from general MIDI (ie emulateable with BASSMIDI) which want an actual card...

Did any other cards "emulate" the AWE32/64 special abilities?

hifidelitygaming wrote:

Another thread mentioned Dungeon Keeper used a custom soundfont which only worked on awe32/64...

Is there a way to emulate that on other machines (to include hacks and workarounds, ie if it was triggered by general midi, then a program like BASSMIDI could load the proprietary soundfonts used if the game could be tricked to recognize it as an awe32) or is a hardware awe card required?

In the case of Dungeon Keeper, I believe a hardware AWE card is required. On a computer with a SB Live!, I tried what Davros suggested (using MPU-401 general midi and loading a Soundfont manually) but it didn't work. It seems the game only uses the midi file and the Soundfonts if it detects an AWE.