bytestorm wrote:Do you know if this solution also frees me fron DMA clicks? 😀
No, it doesn't. The DMA click is a bug/design flaw in the SB 1.x DSP when playing wave files. To avoid this, get a Creative card with 2.x DSP or higher (or just about any clone, as they don't click).
jheronimus wrote:For DOS there are two "high-end" music options. MT-32 and MIDI. 1993 is roughly the year when developers started switching to MIDI. Hence, Sam & Max (1993) has options for both sound standards.
MT-32 is MIDI too. You're referring to General MIDI. General MIDI (frequently abbreviated to "GM") standardised instrument mapping, so that any GM-compliant MIDI device will play the same instrument with the same instruction. Prior to GM, a MIDI instruction would play something with correct timing and pitch, but to get the correct instrument you needed to run the exact device that a music piece was written for. The MT-32 is older than GM and quite a bit of its instrument mapping is different, so the wrong sound will play if you try to play GM music on an MT-32 or MT-32 music on GM. Additionally, the MT-32 has the option to upload samples, whereas GM does not. If an application takes advantage of this feature, it will definitely sound wrong on GM.
TLDR: MT-32 and GM are similar but different, and as jheronimus correctly states, which you want depends on which date your games come from. Some GM devices (specifically the Roland SC-55 rev 2) offer a form of MT-32 emulation, which is not perfect (still no possibility to upload samples, even if instruments are similar, they are not identical) but better than nothing. So if you want MT-32 *AND* GM and can't afford both simultaneously, an SC-55 rev 2 is probably the best compromise. It's also generally cheaper and easier to find than an MT-32, and is still useful for GM/GS ("GS" is a Roland-proprietary superset of GM with quite a bit of support) even if you later do get an MT-32.
With native Windows games you don't need to bother with compatibility all that much.
Nope. That's why the interesting soundcard market pretty much disappeared after Win9x became standard.
bytestorm wrote:Ah good... I have a Aopen AW744L II - Yamaha XG PCI card on the way home for my dedicated win98 pc, so hopefully that´ll be enough for games like curse of the monkey island, broken sword, full throttle and such 😁
Yamaha XG offers excellent GM ("XG" is another proprietary superset like Roland's GS, and is also well-supported), but not MT-32 emulation.
Monkey Island was written for MT-32 and sounds far better with that than with anything else. Later, a GM patch was relased, so at least you get the right instruments, but it doesn't sound as great:
https://youtu.be/a324ykKV-7Y
That said, your XG card is free, an MT-32 would surely not be, so it's a very decent start.
Broken Sword is Windows, so works fine in any event, and Full Throttle is GM anyway. You're good to go 😉
To give you an idea of what the