Hey Cloudschatze,

thank you for this great comparison!

Of course you are right. Roland was THE standard of a time, and almost all tracks composed ON and FOR a Roland synthie sound better when played on one. At least that is what you hear when you ask around. But with Doom the things started to change, for many ears it sounds better when played on Yamaha modules. The same applies to Descent and other later games.

You put in a great example how good a track sounds when optimized for one specific synthesizer but I think the tracks just sound great because they are very limited in the instruments department. The tracks show the positive site of the 1MB EMU ROM (the synthi instruments) and hide its weak sides (guitars, many orchestral instruments for example, unharmonic arrangement). And I think that was a great issue. You can't have good allround quality with just 1MB uncompressed ROM.

So for me the conclusion is: The well known 4MB modules from Roland and Yamaha deliver in almost every game, no matter how complex its music is. Not just because the tracks were composed for them but because the soundfonts offer high quality throughout the bank.

But if you compose a more anemic track of music for the AWE you can really make it shine.

Cheers
Fabian

I love the sound of the AWE. It's different enough from Roland and Yamaha to make it worth listening to.
It's also the first GM compatible card I got (AWE 64 GOLD) after having to listen to SB16 FM music (nothing wrong with it, but sometimes it sounds god awful) for years.

F2bnp wrote:

I love the sound of the AWE. It's different enough from Roland and Yamaha to make it worth listening to.
It's also the first GM compatible card I got (AWE 64 GOLD) after having to listen to SB16 FM music (nothing wrong with it, but sometimes it sounds god awful) for years.

The AWE synth is not GM compatible.

It is for many games, just not all of them because of the driver it uses.

FGB wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I love the sound of the AWE. It's different enough from Roland and Yamaha to make it worth listening to.
It's also the first GM compatible card I got (AWE 64 GOLD) after having to listen to SB16 FM music (nothing wrong with it, but sometimes it sounds god awful) for years.

The AWE synth is not GM compatible.

It is, as long as you use AWEUTIL or Windows 95 and above 😁
Sometimes games have problems playing GM music on the AWE, but I have found very few games that pose such a problem.

OK, I should better say: The EMU8K synth is not hardware compatible with the MPU-401 standard and therefore GM emulation always requires a TSR that routes the Midi signals to the proprietary interface of the EMU.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

It is for many games, just not all of them because of the driver it uses.

No it's not, for no game at all. You cannot choose "MPU-401" nor "General Midi" unless you installed the memory eating TSR called "AWEUTIL" which restricts the so called "GM compatibility" to real mode games only.
General Midi uses the MPU-401 interface implementation as a de facto standard. And while the soundfont matches the General Midi patchset the EMU is just not compatible with the MPU-401 interface.

I wouldn't recommend the AWE series to anyone who is interested in a General Midi compatible device. Direct AWE support is another thing and works fine but it's of course not the same as the benefit of a MPU-401 interface with native game support under an original software environment (DOS, not W9x).

Eh, who the hell cares, it works! 😜

The AWE32 has actually the same problem with MPU-401 compatibility as the GUS.
While Gravis showed that this can be solved very well with a TSR (MegaEM) that uses the API of an expanded memory manager to catch port accesses to 0x3x0h while staying compatible with software using dos extenders Creative probably hadn't such skilled programmers. So aweutil also uses the part of protected mode extensions but starting from real mode to catch port access and put there a NMI exception handler. But since aweutil is already in control of protected mode features, no other software may use them anymore at the same time. Thats a real drawback in comparison to the way megaem sets up the emulation.

This feels a bit off-topic, but General MIDI is neither defined by, nor restricted to, a specific host MIDI interface type. For all intents and purposes, the AWE32, via software and hardware means, meets all the requirements of a General MIDI device. Whether the General MIDI data is sent via an MPU-401 interface, or directly to the AWE32 itself, the same set of General MIDI files tend to be used in either case.

FGB wrote:

... I think the tracks just sound great because they are very limited in the instruments department.

Actually, and more to the point of the Zone Raiders example, the difference here isn't so much the samples themselves at all, in my opinion; rather, it's the fact that the synth itself is better utilized, with a number of NRPNs being used for the AWE playback to great effect. The fact that the Sound Canvas playback is as poor as it is, however, is a bit unexplainable.

Tyrian, on the other hand, seems to be a case where the arrangement itself just seems to lend itself better to the AWE32 than the Sound Canvas (while still remaining pleasant sounding on both).

I played a bit of Descent on a SB32 (ct1600) a while ago, i recall thinking how surprisingly good the music was with an awe card. I tried descent recently with a sc55 and was under the impression that i liked it better back then with the awe32.

MaxWar wrote:

I played a bit of Descent on a SB32 (ct1600) a while ago, i recall thinking how surprisingly good the music was with an awe card. I tried descent recently with a sc55 and was under the impression that i liked it better back then with the awe32.

CT1600 isn't a real AWE32, it's the budget model with the Vibra chip.

sliderider wrote:

MaxWar wrote:

I played a bit of Descent on a SB32 (ct1600) a while ago, i recall thinking how surprisingly good the music was with an awe card. I tried descent recently with a sc55 and was under the impression that i liked it better back then with the awe32.

CT1600 isn't a real AWE32, it's the budget model with the Vibra chip.

Thats why i precised SB32. I do not have the 'genuine' awe32, only the sb32. But for all i know it uses the very same wavetable as the AWE32 so its basically the same thing for this type of midi comparison.

You both mean CT3600 (SB32) rather than CT1600 which is a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 with OPL3 synth.

FGB wrote:

You both mean CT3600 (SB32) rather than CT1600 which is a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 with OPL3 synth.

You are right here, the CT3600 is what i meant. :p

For all intents and purposed a SB32 is a awe32/64 because it has the EMU chip, as far as I know.

Unfortunately SB32 still has the insane noise floor of an AWE32.

The 1MB "quacky" sample rom is a guilty pleasure. I use it by default even today. 🤣

elianda wrote:

Creative probably hadn't such skilled programmers.

It is the hardware design of the emu synth, it is a semi-software synth. I don't see how Aweutil could be improved.

The SB32 CT3600 has a very quiet chipset compared to the others.

Several Bullfrog titles have soundtracks that are, in some respects, AWE/EMU8000 showcases - featuring SoundFont instruments (interspersed with ROM-instrument playback), as well as advanced synth effects through use of NRPNs. Here are a few digital captures from Hi-Octane, and one from Magic Carpet 2. Hope you're a fan of Jungle/Trance stuff, as pertains to the former, and Ambient, in the case of the latter... 😵

Hi-Octane
Tracks 1&2 - AWE32
Tracks 3&4 - AWE32
Tracks 5&6 - AWE32

Magic Carpet 2
Main Menu - AWE32

Damn. These are fantastic. So, does the game upload a SoundFont on the card or is this the 1MB ROM doing some kind of voodoo trickery?

I always thought System Shock sounded amazing on the AWE, its purely electronic sound seemed to fit right in. Good examples of this is the Intro (on the floppy version, I believe the CD version is recorded) and this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W08yrw5H-Q