First post, by GL1zdA
- Rank
- Oldbie
I'm trying to understand why Descent MIDIs sound different on an Audiotrix Pro, depending on how they are played. For testing, I've chosen 4 popular songs from Descent: title screen music, briefing music, level 1 and level 12 music. They sound different depending on how I play them:
1) In game music.
2) GSPLAY playing the dumped MIDIs
3) Media Player (on 98 SE) playing the same dumped MIDIs as GSPLAY
Briefing music sounds the same in game and via GSPLAY and different (and totally odd) via Media Player.
Title music sound okay only in game. Both GSPLAY and Media Player start with some odd piano.
Same on Level 1.
Level 12 sound similar on all of them.
I've attached samples for Briefing and Title music, so you can check it yourself:
There are no differences, for example Doom or Duke Nukem 3D MIDIs sound the same everywhere.
Although this card contains the standard Yamaha YRW801-M ROM chip, the drivers apparently customized some instruments. It definitely sounds different than a Yamaha SW20 that uses the same OPL4 chipset for MIDI (
Descent Title Music, Descent Briefing Music). I thought these customizations didn't happen when applications talked to the card via MPU-401, but some songs sound the same via GSPLAY and Media Player and different in-game, so this is not the case.
For DOS the card is correctly configured with SETMPU /M3, as described here so it should work fine.
The card itself should be OK, I've tested it with the "Euroman" MIDI that was one of the Audiotrix Pro demo songs, and it sounds exactly like what Cloudschatze recorded on his Audiotrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5JU8yF-NBo .
