My YouTube videos generally aren't worth sharing, but this one might interest the Ultima fans... or not. 😀
Atari ST! Ultima III! MIDI output?! Yea, verily!
Man, I love these threads!
Very interesting stuff and FM sounds so warm and welcoming 😀. Could this be the best way to playthrough Ultima III?
As always, thanks for these videos and recordings Cloudschatze!
Really enjoyed that man. Interesting (to me) fact: Ultima 3 was the only Ultima I played to completion on an Atari (8-bit). Good memories...thanks for posting this.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
wrote:Could this be the best way to playthrough Ultima III?
Not necessarily. With today's knowledge, a better approach would likely involve extraction of the original MIDI data, proper arrangement for a particular device, and then reinsertion back into the game.
Configuring a multitimbral synthesizer to deal with a very-constraining set of MIDI data, as per my example, makes for a really cool parlor trick, but it is an incredibly tedious process - cycling through various voice presets to match those that harmonize together, finding an acceptable volume balance between them (while bemoaning the fact that every note-on is fixed-velocity), determining which note ranges should be used to provide the illusion of full orchestration, figuring out how many notes to assign to each instrument, making odd decisions when the polyphony is insufficient, and then compromising on everything because every single setting affects the playback of all songs. I probably spent 4-5 hours coming up with the FB-01 configuration to do all this. It's actually something of a miracle that it sounds as decent as it does.
It certainly doesn't come across that way in the video though, where I suggest that practically anyone could have done the same thing back in 1986 (even your grandmother!), but the reality is that it's very unlikely that anyone would have done it. 😀
Just for fun, here's the output from the SC-55mkII configuration I originally came up with. It doesn't incorporate some of the better-optimized note-range limits used for the FB-01 configuration, so it's a bit rougher in some respects, but certainly gives an idea of playback with that device:
The Exodus Project is also a nice way to play Ultima 3. Optional VGA, use any soundcard for MIDI music, frame limiter and more.
http://exodus.voyd.net/ultima3.html
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
The FB-01's sound amazing. It would be definitely worth for me to playthrough if this could be done on the IBM PC plataform. Has anyone tried the patch above?
