I didn't think Monkey Island supported GM -- only FM and MT-32.

That is entirely correct. Monkey island was not designed for the General MIDI (GM) standard. In fact, it predates it by several years. Consequently, music meant for the MT-32 line of Linear Arithmetic (LA) synthesizers will not sound correct on GM hardware, barring any emulation modes. There are efforts underway to create an MT-32 daughterboard on these forums, but, for now, the only proper way to play those games is with a member of the MT-32 family, or using the MUNT emulator.

A few LucasArts games used default LA modes, so they are some of the few titles which work well under MT-32 emulation.

Yeah, I don't understand how Monkey Island could persuade you to look into a GM module.

MT-32 games will almost never sound correct with a GM module. Monkey Island is somewhat of an exception, as it doesn't upload any samples to the MT-32, so you can achieve some pretty good results by using MT-32 emulation on a lot of GM modules. Monkey Island 2 by contrast will sound mostly awful on anything non MT-32/CM-32/etc
I just think that if you want to buy the X2, you might as well look into many many more recordings to see if it's to your liking.

I have migm1.mid here on my harddisk.
--> played it on X2 using the dry 'audition' preset and following banks :

GUD05 beta bank : https://soundcloud.com/dreamblaster/x2_monkeyisland1_gud05
dream default bank : https://soundcloud.com/dreamblaster/x2_monkeyisland1_dream

What sounds best ?

The Monkey Island "Ultimate Talkie" tool (http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/) can be used to give the MI1 soundtrack a General MIDI option.

Here's the results on my AWE32 in GM mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfZOiM2pvg4
It sounds pretty good to me, both on AWE32 and SC-55 - I don't have an MT-32 (yet?) so this is a nice alternative.

Wow, thanks everyone for the indepth replies. I had no idea Monkey Island was designed to sound best on the MT-32. That's why it always sounded a bit off on these Dreamblasters.

Curious... with the X2, wouldn't it be possible to use an MT-32 clone soundbank... or perhaps build a Monkey Island exclusive soundbank?

Here is the Ultimate Talkie patch pages: http://www.gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies

Creating a custom bank is not an easy task - not easy at all! The best bet is the GM option of the Ultimate Talkie versions, MT-32 is too unique to be emulated by other synths.

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, I don't understand how Monkey Island could persuade you to look into a GM module.

SAM2695 (on DreamBlaster S2) should have MT-32 map. I don't have S2 to test though.

I do have SAM2195 inside a guitar amp which should also have MT-32 map but I have not tried setting it to MT-32 map.

If anyone does try SAM chips in MT-32 mode please upload results 😀

Jepael - thanks for the tip man!

I always thought you couldn't edit the ROM banks inside the S2?

-Retro

^ no edit - it just re-arranges the order of the instruments to make it more compatible with the MT-32 order. But in the end it's just a map - no extra mt-32 features are supported...