VOGONS


First post, by ThunderPeel2001

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I've been trying to get the bottom of what might be the most appropriate sound set up for the classic LucasArts titles (ie. the sound setup that LucasArts intended for the best experience), and this forum seems to have an astonishing wealth of knowledge on such things.

Maniac Mansion | PC Speaker?
Maniac Mansion - Enhanced | ???
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders | PC Speaker?
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders - Enhanced | ???
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade - EGA | ???
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade - VGA | ???
Loom - EGA | ???
Loom - VGA | ???
The Secret of Monkey Island - EGA | MT-32? (with official patch)
The Secret of Monkey Island - VGA | MT-32?
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge | Roland CM-32L (with fan created Adlib patch for SFX)
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis | CM-32L
Day of the Tentacle | CM-32L
Sam & Max - Hit the Road | General MIDI

Future titles had digital sound.

Last edited by ThunderPeel2001 on 2015-11-06, 12:56. Edited 5 times in total.

Reply 1 of 14, by jesolo

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Most of these looks correct but, I believe that Fate of Atlantis & Day of the Tentacle's soundtracks were written for General MIDI. MT-32 is supported via remapping of the instruments.

Reply 2 of 14, by PhilsComputerLab

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jesolo wrote:

Most of these looks correct but, I believe that Fate of Atlantis & Day of the Tentacle's soundtracks were written for General MIDI. MT-32 is supported via remapping of the instruments.

Fate of Atlantis unfortunately never supported GM. I remember this vividly as a kid, hoping and waiting for a GM patch 🙁

It only supports Roland as MIDI device.

DOTT, I think, supports both though.

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Reply 3 of 14, by ThunderPeel2001

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Yes, everything seems to indicate that the CM-32L units were the target for DOTT and FOA. Not sure about the others, though 😒

Is it worth investing in an SC-55 or 88 for Gneral MIDI titles?

Reply 4 of 14, by leileilol

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the Maniac Mansions probably sound best on Tandy 4voice IIRC

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Reply 5 of 14, by ThunderPeel2001

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I think you're right. Looking at scans of the original box, it says IBM, Tandy and Compatible. (I was an Amiga kid, so I know everything about those machines, but very little about DOS machines in the 80s and 90s -- sigh.)

On the Last Crusade cover they made a point about supporting an Adlib soundcard. With Monkey Island 1 they make a point of supporting Adlib and Soundblaster -- I think the Roland addition was an afterthought(?). Monkey Island 2 is the first cover to actually mention Roland support, it seems.

As Phil said, Fate of Atlantis saying nothing about General MIDI. It says it supports Adlib, Soundblaster, Roland and Sound Master II cards on its original cover.

Reply 6 of 14, by NewRisingSun

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Maniac Mansion | Tandy
Maniac Mansion - Enhanced | Tandy
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders | Tandy
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders - Enhanced | Tandy

Tandy means running the game under DOSBox with "machine=tandy" in dosbox.conf.

Reply 7 of 14, by Great Hierophant

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Since NewRisingSun covered the Maniac and Zak, let me finish the rest of the games :

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade - EGA | Adlib (or Game Blaster for stereo)
Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade - VGA | Adlib (or Game Blaster for stereo)
Loom - EGA | MT-32 (with official patch)
Loom - VGA | CD Audio is the only option
The Secret of Monkey Island - EGA | MT-32 (with official patch, also fan created Adlib patch for SFX)
The Secret of Monkey Island - VGA | MT-32 (also fan created Adlib patch for SFX)
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge | Roland CM-32L (also fan created Adlib patch for SFX)
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis | CM-32L
Day of the Tentacle | CM-32L (with official patch)
Sam & Max - Hit the Road | General MIDI

Finally, if you do not want the ugly text font of the non-Enhanced versions of Maniac and Zak, there are fan created patches to allow it to run on any PC machine type with the tandy audio set to On instead of auto. Find them here : Re: VGA machine and Tandy audio for Maniac Mansion?

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/ - Nerdly Pleasures - My Retro Gaming, Computing & Tech Blog

Reply 9 of 14, by NewRisingSun

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That's because MT-32/General MIDI support was not added as an afterthought, but because they wanted to save one measly diskette. The foreign language versions also come with MT-32/General MIDI support out of the box, likely because the local distributors did not want to be bothered with sending out disks to individual people.

Reply 10 of 14, by Great Hierophant

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I could mention that LucasArts charged $10.00 for the Loom and Secret of Monkey Island MT-32 upgrade disks back in the day. For Day of the Tentacle, you probably only had to pay shipping.

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/ - Nerdly Pleasures - My Retro Gaming, Computing & Tech Blog

Reply 11 of 14, by ThunderPeel2001

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Ouch.

Reply 12 of 14, by avx

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TBH if you care about the music a lot, the Amiga,C64 and FMTowns versions of the early games like maniac,zak,loom are something to look into.
I got my first PC in ~1992 and that's around when PC music had all kinds of options. (my PC ended having 3 sound cards by '96*)

Windows, 3D and CD's brought so much change that some developers of the day said they had to throw away everything often and the "improvements" if you ask me were kinda like LCD TV with 3D glasses vs OLED TV and no 3D... Gimmicks vs quality. I think Q1 looks better without all the filtering done by majority of 3D cards - the filtering just destroys detail and makes for dull plastic look in all games. I don't recall shimmering of the excess detail being an issue every with software rendering & CRT's. Not having cleartype & 3d filtering would immediately reveal how crap LCD's really are vs CRT (eg.imo rectangular pixel boundaries aren't "sharpness" but a defect - now 270+DPI is attempt to fix that defect but much harder to drive and require more input detail for same perceived effect due to the forgiving nature of say crt tv with low res content vs lcd - if the detail is there, then LCD does look better detail wise but that also means you need more time in production to produce all the fine detail).

*in theory SB16 & GUS and even PAS should sound about the same (for digital sample play) if you go by specs but having bought back those cards and just testing them, they sound all completely different for both digital and music. But this is the kind of thing that some people just don't notice and I think it tells that there is probably some genetics in play - some people don't get any feeling from music while I get very intense feelings - so I have desire for quality in the audio quality and that music itself, where quality is defined by what I feel as most satisfying experience, not by any scientific metric. In music, what is satisfying is not equal to what is mathematically perfect (personal thing, I think there's modern musicians that compose based on theory instead of feeling). I came across a paper where the authors were surprised that brains react to ultrasounds over 50 Khz as measured by EEG. So to people used to hearing live music, they are not (as) satisfied with recordings as recordings miss that thing in the 50+ Khz that they have been accustomed to.

So what personally is going on I believe is that I was accustomed to certain kind of sound card audio signature and due to effects of "nostalgy" etc, I prefer that type of signature. I am investigating if it's possible to reproduce the same effect on other cards with some EQ for example.

Reply 13 of 14, by DataPro

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Hello everybody !
Is-it normal that it's impossible to make Sam'N'Max Hit the Road CD works with MIDI ?

HP Vectra 562 P166Mhz/256Ko L2 cache/Triton 430FX - 112Mo RAM - 2x 32Go+64Go CF Card - Matrox G2 8Mo - SB AWE64 ISA (PnP) + Roland MT-32 & M-GS64 (SC-88) & JV-1010 - Nec USB 2.0 PCI - Promise Ultra100 TX2 - Hama multicard reader

Reply 14 of 14, by leileilol

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yes. they're practically bonus materials of a gotta-use-up-that-disc-space manner

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