"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Re: MT32, I swear I had MT32 emulation working for a bunch of Sierra games. That was my whole reason for doing it. Oh and I think it was for Loom and Monkey Island as well that I cared... memory's fuzzy.
My friend had an Awe64 and I remember his never seemed to work in DOS properly without drivers loaded... mine detected as a standard SB16 in every game I ever threw at it... he was always fighting with drivers. It could have just been a system thing. My whole "it being in hardware vs software" was based on that experience and vague memories of the two cards... and me mocking him for years over his. I can quote no source but my own sordid youth.
Edit: Funny thing is wiki says the AWE64 had improved compatibility which was the opposite of my experience...
The AWE64 was a "plug and play" card and such needed to be configured with Creative's plug and play utility. I'm not sure if there were non-PnP AWE32 cards.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Speaking of MT-32 (and to answer an earlier post, I think all three MT-32s I've seen and personally held had the headphone jack - but I can't comment on the quality), what sound cards are recommended to connect the MT-32? Anything come to mind in particular?
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Wow, okay, so apparently this whole time I had no idea what the MT-32 was... I always thought it was a regular sound card in the sense that the AdLib/SB/GUS were sound cards...
Since everyone always claimed it was the best you could do at the time, I always planned to add one to my DOS PC... but how exactly do you go about that then? Do I just get the appropriate cable and plug it into the MIDI/Game port on my SB16? Do you need drivers or anything? What is a good price for an MT-32? Is it even worth bothering with?
--Zero
Here's a good retrospective on the history of sound cards that I found awhile back:
http://www.crossfire-designs.de/inde...ndcards&page=1
The MT-32 sounds awesome, but I'm not sure how many games out there take advantage of its capabilities. It was distributed by Sierra starting in 1987, so a lot of Sierra games catered to it. The problem is there's a fairly small window of opportunity there. They started distributing it in 1987 and the market switched to plain ol' MIDI in the early 90s. MIDI music still sounds great through the MT-32, but there were only a hundred or so games that specifically took advantage of the unit's capabilities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...computer_games
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Even if it is only for a few games, the design means it isn't a drain on system resources (ie, it's not taking up an ISA slot, or hogging an IRQ), so it's easier to justify.
I notice a lot of games have an option for "General MIDI"... is that something best done through an MT-32? Or would that sound exactly the same coming out of an AWE32?
--Zero
Generally any card will do MIDI, and the Awe32/GUS do it with wavetable audio (iirc)
So yes it'll sound way better on an Awe32 and APPARENTLY godly on an MT32... but I never got to find that out. I do recall liking the samples better when emulating one but it varied game to game.
For a side-by-side comparison of how most of the best sound cards sound, you can check out my short video here. It compares Secret of Monkey Island themes on the sound devices it was ported to.
Evolution of PC Audio as told by Monkey Island
Like the others have said, it's amazing on the games that fully support it.
Compare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n4nOiURgzg to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoiV...eature=related
They go for around $50 these days.
What would be REALLY cool is a CM-500 which combines the MT-32 and SC-55 (for General MIDI) into a single unit. They would go for way more than the two of those together though.
The '55 itself has an MT-32 emulation mode.
Hmmm, well the computer I used before the one I'm currently using was considered "old", but I just brought the same sound card up to my recent build. It's a Santa Cruz Turtle Beach sound card, and a very nice card if I do say so myself.
I was at a garage sale about a year ago and the people there had a Roland PC-200 MIDI controller keyboard for sale, $20. I decided it was worth that price and bought it. As I was leaving the sale the lady running it said "Hey wait, don't forget the card that goes with it". She gave it to me, I got home, and whaddya know, it's a Roland SCC-1 MIDI card. I tried using it on my previous computer, actually, which had a single ISA slot. It didn't work too well, and it was probably because my computer was too new to begin with. The SCC-1 looks like a really nice retro sound card, though, and I hope to be able to use it someday. I'm hoping that eventually someone will invent a sort of ISA adapter for new computers that works maybe USB/PCI, or something like that.
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