Reply 20 of 45, by darry
jheronimus wrote on 2021-03-05, 14:45:Hezus wrote on 2021-03-03, 16:34:A Pentium 3 with an MT-32 seems like a mismatch to me. An early 90s system would be a lot better.
I think it's not just a mismatch, but quite a few MT-32-capable games might simply not work on a P3. I remember that some Legend Entertainment titles (like Superhero League of Hoboken) didn't really work on a fast system for me, and I think I've read that some Sierra/Dynamix titles might have issues, too. 386DX33-486DX33 should be optimal to showcase MT-32 music.
An excessively fast system will indeed break compatibility with lots of older games, including but not limited to, MT-32 compatible ones, but there are workarounds .
Legend Entertainment's Gateway (notoriously speed sensitive) works fine for me with an MT-32 (and SoftMPU) on a P3 1.4GHz with L1 and L2 caches disabled, as do all the MT-32 compatible titles that I have tried (including Space Quest III, AFAICR), though I have obviously not tried all of them . Lowering FSB to 66MHz from 100MHz or 133MHz would provide an additional slowdown, if necessary . Then there are slowdown utilities (which I have not needed yet) .
My reason for doing this is lack of space, which lead me to consolidate DOS and Windows 98 SE software into a single build . The way I see it, you can always slow down a system that's too fast, if necessary . If the system is too slow, you can't do much short of upgrading or using another system .