First post, by 1633Hz
(I wasn't sure if this should go in the Mac or the PC forum, but I thought that since all of the interested parties would probably be in here, I'd try here first.)
This is my first post to these forums, so I hope everyone will go a bit easy on me. Simcity 2000's different sounding music between the PC and Mac versions has always been a point of ire for some people, myself actually excluded. I recently found out that the Mac version included a specialty GM midi synth, contracted out from another company (It's actually something called Halestorm, which later became a more commercialized product called SoundMusicSys)and filled with Maxis specific instrument sounds. The problem for the differences lies mostly in the fact that both the music and the instrument set were designed for each, even without the instrument set as in the Windows and DOS versions, which used the exact same music as far as I can tell, and which is why many midi devices don't give a good impression for the music.
I can listen to the sounds used in the synth (along with all of the sound effects used in the game) by grabbing the Simcity 2000 for Mac main executable and running it into Audacity under raw mode, but there are clicks and pops, and I'm not sure the proper way to extract them. There are only a few instruments actually used in the synth and most of them sound simple enough.
TL;DR: Is it possible to properly extract the instrument sounds from the Mac 68k version of Simcity 2000, make a Simcity 2000 specific soundfont, and then hook it up to DOSBox or a windows midi device like Timidity++? I know it won't interest many people, but having Simcity 2000 play in what I feel is a more integrated version, but sounding the way it was designed to sound is too intriguing of a task for me to resist.