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First post, by Gagster

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I grew up with an elder brother who owned an Amiga 1200, and one thing I did enjoy about the Amiga was its audio quality. A number of games that were both on the Amiga and on MS-DOS PCs did sound different music-wise; I guess the differences between the sound chip in the Amiga and the standard Sound Blaster cards of that time are to blame.

If you take games like The Settlers 1, I personally prefer the OST on the Amiga compared to the PC version (even the GUS variant). The DOS version of Settlers 1 supported higher resolutions than the Amiga version, so as with many other early 90ties games, the graphics was better on on the MS-DOS version while the Amiga did a more favorable job audio wise (well, it also comes to personal preferences).

In the DOS era the music often sounded different depending on which sound-card you chose, reminding me of how various sound-card handled midi-files in earlier Windows versions.

Has there been known experiments in the DOSBox community of making the Sound Blaster emulation imitating the sound-bank of the Amiga? I have no clue whatsoever if such a thing could be possible without enormous efforts; I suppose that it would in theory be a much more complex job than just changing up the Sound Blaster instruments in DOSBox one-by-one to create the distinctive Amiga-sound.

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Reply 1 of 4, by BloodyCactus

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Amiga didnt have a "sound bank" its sound was from Paula, 8bit PCM (basically, its all samples), think more along the lines of the original 8bit sound blaster. What the amiga did have that the SB didnt, was the funky 12db low pase filter.

It didnt have FM like the SB cards. amiga was pretty much all sample based.

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Reply 2 of 4, by leileilol

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Probably the closest you can do is use the GUS, and then attempt to assemble patches out of the ye old ST-XX samples to get that extremely reduced quality Korg/Yamaha/Roland sampled 80s synth sound the amiga's known for...

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Reply 3 of 4, by root42

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If you prefer the sound of the Amiga version of games I suggest you play them on an Amiga emulator. As mentioned before, the Amiga didn’t have a soundbank. It had four channels of PCM audio. You probably can get many Amiga game music scores as dedicated MOD tracker files on some video game music site and then you can play them alongside whatever, even while playing your DOS version of the game.

One such music site would be: http://mirsoft.info/gamemods.php

Hope this link doesn’t offend any rules, as it’s only soundtracks, not software.

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Reply 4 of 4, by Gagster

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Thanks for all the reply's.

For certain DOS games it would be quite tempting to just run the Amiga-soundtrack in the background via a dedicated MOD tracker; I suppose if I were to play The Settlers 1 on DOSBox, that would do the trick (since I believe that game only has 1 music theme). For games like Goblins 3 in DOSBox, I would have to run a MOD tracker in the background and randomly chose 1 of the 3 Amiga OST for that game if I want the DOS graphics with the Amiga experience (the Amiga version of Goblins 3 didn't have that rich VGA palette of the DOS version). Then I would have to remember to manually shuffle to the next track after advancing to the next level in Goblins 3.

I'm not much into programming, but maybe it could in theory be possible with use of scripting languages and some kind of debugging to find out when each specific game was about to change the in-game music track in DOSBox, and then send a signal to the MOD tracker in the background to change to the desired music track automatically.

I guess I'm quite nostalgic for the sampled 80s synth sound that the Amiga was known for; many times the graphics were lacking on the Amiga (compared to the MS-DOS version) for the game titles that were published in the early 90s.

CPU: i7-4790K
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OS: Windows 10 64 bit