Forgot to mention, WinXP Pro.

#Edit#

Wanted to follow up, there is no change in behavior with dosbox 0.70.

I also got the MIDI conversions of the UW2 music just to make sure I'm not remembering wrong.

I'll come back in a bit and post a little mp3 of dosbox's output...

OK, so I recorded some samples of the UW2 music from Dosbox and strung them together in an MP3. If someone has time can you listen and compare with what you get?

I just want to know if I'm getting the "expected" music output and I should stop trying to tweak it, or if I am not crazy and it in fact isn't what I should be getting.

Also I would try VDMSound, but the last time I tried to run Ultima Underworld (either one) on a modern fast computer, something about the unexpected speed of the processor made the movement not work correctly. I could only move in cardinal directions, i.e. if my guy was aimed at a slight angle to N, S, E, W he would walk semi-sideways in the closest N, S, E, W direction. I also had trouble walking slowly. (I'm thinking very high framerates caused very low per-frame vector coordinates in movement to become -actually- zero.)

What do you mean by "opl music"? Do I have to select some specific option in the setup in order to set it? Because when I choose all the default settings I get totally different sound than yours:
http://www.fileflyer.com/view/HNZvBCy

[edit]
Now that I think of it, maybe you mean the DOSBox Build with "munt"(MT-32 Emulation)? If so, can't help you there...

Yes! That's how it's supposed to sound, at least very close to it. Can you post the dosbox.conf you use to run UW2, and maybe tell me what sound cards are listed when you run 'uwsound' in dosbox?

I've been kind of loosely saying "opl" to mean the FM synthesis the AdLib and Sound Blasters used to do, how those old cards made all the "music" heard in old dos games. If I'm not bastardizing terms too much the chip was an OPL chip and had several versions; opl2 in vanilla Sound Blaster, dual opl2 in SB Pro, opl3 in SB16 I think?

anyway I've tried all three of those and all the sound cards with no changes... That dosbox.conf would be incredibly helpful!

misterbk wrote:

That dosbox.conf would be incredibly helpful!

As I said, all settings were default, i.e. dosbox.conf is the default one that comes with the official 0.71(I didn't change anything).
And it doesn't matter which sound card I choose(SBpro, Adlib, SB, etc...) in uinstall.exe, they all sounds the same.

If the music is in MIDI format, I think I read somewhere that DOSBox doesn't emulate MIDI, so the MIDI is sent to the OS to be processed there, and of course since MIDI are only notes, every device handles it differently, so that could explain your problem.
But I'm really not sure about it, so just wait for someone more knowledgeable than me to elaborate on the MIDI part.

So strange. My dosbox.conf also started out pretty much default. The only things I changed were adding an automatic mount command for c:\ and setting the display so it scaled properly in fullscreen.

The file I recorded wasn't using midi... It was using the emulated fm synth. I can force it to use midi by setting this line in dosbox.conf:

[midi]
config=0 (or 1, or 5 produce different sound banks, all pretty bad)

... and then running uinstall, and setting the music device to be Roland MT32.

I at least get the correct octaves that way, but the instruments end up completely wrong. Every instrument sounds like a solo lead in a marching band or something.

I can tell the mp3 I recorded was not running through midi because if I set things back that way and tweak the "midi" slider in my windows mixer, the music volume doesn't change. (It does if I do the special settings above.)

Next step I guess is to remove dosbox.conf and see if that does anything.

Nope - removing and recreating dosbox.conf from defaults got me exactly the same sound.

I wonder if the problem is with UW2 itself. I ran a patch on it that replaced these files:

UW2.EXE Overwrite [Y/N] N
FAQA.TXT Overwrite [Y/N] N
DATA/CNV.ARK Overwrite [Y/N] N
DATA/STRINGS.PAK Overwrite [Y/N] N
SOUND/DD01.ADV Overwrite [Y/N] N
SOUND/DD02.ADV Overwrite [Y/N] N

Reading FAQA.TXT makes me think this is the patch the UW2 design team released to fix the Servant Strike and "sleeping with the Moonstone on the cursor" bugs and not an NT patch or anything. I've been copying those folders from drive to drive since the original 486-dx2 I installed it on so things may have gotten a bit confused.

Also changing the 'oplrate' sample rate setting has no effect except for quality of the weird music.

BTW my sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2, though since dosbox is emulating and spitting out wave data that shouldn't matter...

Well, like you, I also think that if DOSBox emulates the sound, your sound card shouldn't matter, but I'm no expert. I also find it hard to believe that a later version or a patch would change the music so drastically...(my version comes from a collection I bought several years ago, It's called "The Ultimate RPG Archives")

I think you should wait a day or two for the real experts, they'll probably know what to do.

Yeah, that's about where I'm at with this troubleshoot.

I think my version is from the original floppy set, but it's also possible it's from the CDROM collection with UW1 and UW2. (I had both since the way to get UW1 was to get that collection.)

I'm no expert when it comes to sound, but certain sound options use your Windows instrument table to create the music. General MIDI does this for one - and the resulting music will differ based on the soundcard you have.

Maybe I read all this wrong, BUT misterbk, if you setup UW2 to not use midi then you will get the default music as it sounded originally. To do that start uinstall.exe and choose something other than Roland... (but NONE or PC-Speaker are not good choices as well). After that you should start uwsound.exe, just to make sure that UW2 uses the correct IRQ (7).

If you insist on the Roland option you should have a MT-32 or similar hooked up or you will get music played through your systems midi device and this will not sound correctly.

If you still have problems, please post which sound setting you have chosen in uinstall.

I think he made it pretty clear that he did try all sound card options, either that, or I completely misunderstood him.

Mr.bk, maybe you should try to download a different version(it's legal if you own it), I think abandonia has it.

Yeah, the MP3 I posted was definitely the result I get when I use Sound Blaster Pro as the "music" sound card. i.e. the MP3 was NOT midi - I verified this by moving the "MIDI" slider in my mixer in windows while the game was running, with no volume change. The volume did change when I moved the "Wave" slider.

Here's a quick recap of this since I've kinda talked a lot above...:

- The MP3 posted is the music UW2 makes with a default config (no dosbox.conf modifications even to graphics.)

- Changing the sound card type in dosbox.conf (sbtype=?) has no effect except for choosing something that just doesn't work.

- Enabling/Disabling the Gravis Ultrasound and Disney Sound emulation has no effect.

- Forcing certain OPL synth types has no effect.

- I've been watching the environment variable in dos (BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 T6), and it gets set correctly (T6, T4, T2 dep. on sound card set.) UW2 is set to use I/O 220 for music and detects the music sound card.

- Forcing MIDI for music is possible and I also tried that, but its result isn't pleasant either. I am also able to correctly choose between different sound card midi tables. MIDI music does deliver the correct octaves of all the notes. (I think that's the first actual clue I've gotten to what's going on.) The instruments are also generally correct, i.e. the intro uses a trumpet not a castrated flute.

- This is the setup it's running on:
Dosbox 0.71 OR 0.70 (both do it)
Dual 3.0ghz Xeon computer (i.e. enough power, no speed worries)
Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS
Windows XP Pro
Either windowed or fullscreen, no change.
dosbox.conf attached to message

My conclusion so far is the game is asking for the correct music notes. That gets passed to a driver to produce them. If the notes go to the OPL driver, they come out wrong instruments and octaves. If they go to the MIDI driver, they come out correct instrument type and octave, but sound bad cuz it's General Midi.

... So I guess the problem has to be in Ultima Underworld's OPL driver itself, since dosbox configuration is ruled out, and other people get correct sound from the same version of dosbox. I must have tried an NT patch at some point or something and accidentally archived the changed version.

Also, Abandonia did have it, Thanks! I'm going to experiment a bit and try inserting the sound driver only from that into my existing install, and find the real problem. (This has become a personal challenge!)

And success. I don't know how, but my UW2 files were apparently messed up somehow, just enough to screw with the music but not enough to crash anything. The version from Abandonia gives correct sound.

Thanks for the help everybody!

If anyone else has this problem and happens on this in a search, my guess is that some combination of patching messed up UW2's OPL synth driver. It could have been the NT patch because at one point I was trying to run it in windows and having trouble. I'll post back in a bit with the specific file that was the culprit.

I ran across something fascinating in my UW2 sound directory. Check this attachment out.

I was playing with General Midi back in the day after I got my first midi music keyboard, and apparently at some point I found a UW2 General MIDI patch and installed it! Way to go, me. The attachment is the Readme from that patch, for anyone who's curious, since I haven't seen any mention of its existence in modern times. (Probably because general midi requires extra equipment and tends to suck!)

I noticed it when the number of files in uw2\sound were different between mine and the Abandonia version.

#edit#
I'm way too fast on the posting - there right next to it is UW2GM.ZIP. So if anyone is curious, I can send them this General Midi patch.

The General MIDI patch was the culprit. It replaced all of the XMI files in the uw2\sound directory. Putting the original ones from Abandonia back in solved the problem.

This makes me curious, since I apparently kept playing with this patch installed back in the day. I'm going to turn on my old keyboard, hook up the midi, and see what it sounds like.