Secret of Monkey Island is a Roland MT-32 game, it doesn't support General MIDI.

Thanks for the precision. I dug into Midi vs MT-32 and it turns out that the SC55ST has a (limited) way to emulate the MT-32.

Play MT32EMUL.mid on the SC-55ST enables the MT-32 mode.

It seems it kinda works for Monkey Island 1 because it uses mostly the default instruments. I say it kinda work because I still cannot hear the flute well so maybe this one instrument is not default?

Anyway, here is how it sound for the curious (since I use a SB to drive the SC-55ST I think this sample suffer from the stuck note bug, I have not received my music quest yet 😜).

fabiensanglard wrote on 2025-01-29, 03:32:

Thanks for the precision. I dug into Midi vs MT-32

There is no "Midi vs MT-32", it's GM vs MT-32. Both are MIDI.

MIDI is a communication protocol for musical instruments. "Play note X on instrument Y for duration Z". The MT-32 is fully MIDI-compliant so understands those messages as well as any GM device.

What MIDI does not define is which instrument is on which number. Older devces such as the MT-32 had proprietary layouts so you could get different instruments. 78 on an MT-32 is the pan pipes. GM is a standard layout of instruments so if you choose say instrument 78 you will always get a whistle.

So if a game is designed for MT-32 and the main melody is supposed to be on pan pipes, instead with a GM synth you get a whistle. Perfectly MIDI, but not GM. Which sounds weird.

The differences between MT-32 and SC-55 are bigger than just instrument layout though, which is why even with MT-32 mode on the SC-55 (basically a re-mapping of the instrument set to correspond to the MT-32 layout) doesn't sound exactly like the MT-32. Even though the sound quality of the SC-55 is in general superiod to that of the MT-32, the SC-55 is purely sample-based whereas the MT-32 can also do linear arithmetic synthesis, modifying the sound of samples in a way the SC-55 can't - and some samples just sound different. So the MT-32 mode at least gives you the right instruments, but at best they sound a bit different to the MT-32 originals (like GM music sounds different on a non-SC-55 GM synth) and at worst some parts are missing because the GM synth simply can't do the linear arithmetic synth.