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Best sound option for Ecstatica 2?

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First post, by AppleSauce

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So I'm in a bit of a bind , I beat ecstatica 1 recently and now I've started 2 but I'm not sure what sound option to go with.

In 1 I went with the sc55 and sound blaster which seemed like a good bet because thr game came out in 1994.

2 came out 96, 97ish.

And has a windows and dos version install on the cd.

The dos version which i installed on my 6.22 drive has gravis with ultamid, awe32 , scc1 (so soundcanvas) and just the soundblaster.

The Windows version which i installed on my 95 drive just defaults to what your main soundcard is and has no options.

I can't find any info on what device the composer intended to have the music play on.

Anyone got any insight?

Reply 1 of 4, by Garrett W

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I think you'd be safe with the Roland SC-55 option.

Please note that Ecstatica 2 plays unreasonably fast under Windows even with just slightly newer CPUs. The DOS version features a proper framecap and does not suffer from this issue and you will see the game as intended.

Reply 2 of 4, by AppleSauce

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Garrett W wrote on 2023-09-05, 05:09:

I think you'd be safe with the Roland SC-55 option.

Please note that Ecstatica 2 plays unreasonably fast under Windows even with just slightly newer CPUs. The DOS version features a proper framecap and does not suffer from this issue and you will see the game as intended.

Alright thanks for the info , ill keep in that in mind.
So would a pentium 233 mmx be too fast for the game?

Reply 3 of 4, by petran79

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I remember that Ecstatica 2 had indeed faster speed on Windows than DOS
Best current option is to play the patched version that has correct MIDI music.
https://ecstatica.fandom.com/wiki/Playing_Ecs … _Modern_Systems

Unfortunately while DOS version has the correct framerate, the game breaking Amazon bug is only patched in the Windows version.

Reply 4 of 4, by petran79

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Regarding a previous thread about the game and Gravis Ultrasound that was locked due to necrobumping:

Game seems to have issues with GUS in general. Dosbox and forks freeze with that option enabled. I managed to play GUS using 86box DOS with Gravis but then again, game runs only after CD installation and GUS midi has issues with background noise and garbled sound. Rest of GUS games run fine. And even on 86box, if you run game from C: , this time after exiting CD install, it freezes at the intro.
A user using PicoGUS on a real Pentium managed to run it but it has the same issues. It only works when PicoGUS is in SB mode, meaning game has to use SB midi driver option.

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