Midi Synths and making old games sound great

Zerker on 4/8/2014 at 17:49

I was recently listening to some Ultima 7 midis using timidity and I was thrown by how... wrong certain songs sounded to me. Then I got thinking, and I probably haven't really be satisfied with Midis since I upgraded my SoundBlaster AWE64 to an SB Live back somewhere between 1998 and 2000. Every MIDI source from the SB Live to various Softsynths (Timidity, Fluidsynth, etc) have sounded either strange (off-sounding instruments, weird volume levels) or in some cases even off-tune, no matter which soundfont I was using.

The first step I took was tracking down some higher qualify recordings of some of my favourite music to remind myself that yes, this CAN sound good. Then I had the next dangeous thought: I wonder how hard it is to hook up some of the classic hardware synths to my PC?

Turns out the answer is: pretty easy.

So I bought this bad boy:
(http://zerker.ca/misc/MT32.jpg)

Inline Image:

http://zerker.ca/misc/MT32small.jpg

With a USB to Midi adaptor, and some appropriate audio connections, I'm up and running. I've been spending some time the past couple days messing around with Dosbox and ScummVM testing out just about every pre 1994 game I own with MT32 support. The results have been pretty surprising in some cases. Here are some samples:

First up is the X-Com intro
[video=youtube;MFdnwv0aji0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFdnwv0aji0[/video]

And some audio files. Note that in the Monkey Island case, the 'hiss' at the start is actually part of the instrument sound. It goes away as soon as the main theme starts up. It's actually surprisingly close to the CD version.

(http://zerker.ca/misc/uw.ogg) Ultima Underworld
(http://zerker.ca/misc/monkeyisland.ogg) Monkey Island
(http://zerker.ca/misc/u7quotes.ogg) Ultima 7 Quotes

It also made a huge difference with Prince of Persia 2. Here's someone's recording on Youtube, which also illustrates the status messages that some games can upload to the device :).
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17HIpmYBqyM)

I still need to get something for General Midi though. SoundCanvas, probably.

So... anyone else here rocking hardware midi synth? Memories of favourite hardware? Anyone have better experience than I with software synth?

demagogue on 5/8/2014 at 03:36

I'm curious about it & liked reading your post. I bought a new keyboard recently, a Yamaha Mox8, & have been connecting that to my PC, although there's a delay with the input that doesn't make it all that useful. I like its soundbank though & a lot of the classic synths it has natively.

Edit. For software synth I use Absynth & like it a lot. I guess it's for 'cinematic' & atmospheric sounds. You can make or morph some pretty weird & tortured sounds. Well I have fun doing it. I like making atmospheric soundscapes & ambient stuff.

Zerker on 5/8/2014 at 22:45

Yeah, keyboards can certainly be a more available alternative than a sound module, though they take up a bit more space :). As you mentioned many keyboards (and sound modules) will contain older sample sets to sound more appropriate to whatever the 'target synth' the game may have been composed for. Probably not the best option for non-musicians though.

I'm surprised you had a delay with your keyboard; I didn't notice anything with the MT-32. Considering several games actually use it for sound effects (Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld, etc), a delay would be pretty noticeable if it didn't match up with the display. Were you using the keyboard for Midi input, or were you attempting to send midi data to the keyboard? If you haven't tried it yet, see if there's a comparable delay playing midi from the computer to the keyboard. Dosbox, ScummVM and ZDoom should all support selecting alternate midi outputs. I'm using a basic M-Audio UNO to connect the module to my computer without any issues. It could be a problem with the midi interface you're using.

Absynth looks great for musicians, but probably a bit overkill for the purpose of making old games sound right :). I'm not even sure it can be used in this manner from reading the web site. Can you treat it as a virtual midi device and use it with games? Use it to play back classic general midi files?

demagogue on 6/8/2014 at 05:12

I don't know about what you're trying to do, so I'm afraid I can't give advice. I haven't messed with midi in games in ages.

What I meant by delay on my keyboard was plugging it in via a USB jack & playing directly into, e.g., a Fruity Loops track in time with the rhythm. I believe the problem is the FL overhead, or whatever its pipeline is to get midi in, not the keyboard itself. I actually don't know how to get the keyboard sounds to play off my PC. The best I can figure out is getting the key-presses recognized and playing PC internal sounds from other sources. Sounds like the flip-side of everything you're doing.

I don't know if Absynth does what you're asking. I can run it in Fruity Loops as a plugin so I can play its sounds on FL tracks. So there's something there like a midi device if you can wrangle it right maybe. I think it's meant to largely be a standalone synthesizer though. Good luck with your experiments.

faetal on 6/8/2014 at 10:04

(http://www.thewhippinpost.co.uk/latency.htm)

Zerker on 6/8/2014 at 21:30

I've more or less figured out what I want, but I figured I would bring it up for discussion here to see who else wants to talk about making classic games sound great :). I renamed the thread slightly accordingly.

As for the hookups, it's not too difficult:
Midi Out from PC -> Midi In on synth
Audio Output on Synth -> Line in on PC

Then make sure you have your sound card set to record from line in, and/or playback the audio. Of course, if you're doing it to compose music, you'll need a fairly good sound card, or (probably) some sort of alternate external recording setup.

Al_B on 8/8/2014 at 17:21

I have a MT-32 kicking around that I bought years ago largely for old games but also with the aim of using it for creating music (which I never got round to!). I haven't had it hooked up for ages, however - which MIDI adapter did you use out of interest?

As an alternative, I have used (http://munt.sourceforge.net/) Munt for some games on dosbox and been pretty happy with the results. Unless things have changed you do need to hunt down the ROMs, however, which is probably down to your conscience and whether you can justify it based on owning the actual hardware.

Muzman on 8/8/2014 at 19:26

I had a Turtle Beach Rio/Monterey once (might still do somewhere). Got it mainly for the best signal to noise available at the time and it made me an audio guy, of sorts. But it's true that despite the rather nice GM instruments it had, it did still sound a bit wrong.

They were actually too good for a lot of the game compositions you'd run into and despite being miles crisper and clearer it was fairly plain, when listening to some things through an old SB16, that the composer had specifically written the piece for all the ways the the old SB sound set didn't sound like the instruments they were supposed to be and the crappy amps compressed the mix etc.

I wanted some ideal mix of both.

I always liked all those weird options in the old DOS games and wondered what the heck they were. In audio stuff, for instance, every game is supporting this thing called the Gravis Ultrasound. I wondered what the heck that was. Never saw one in my life. Then again, sound cards of any sort were pretty unusual for a long ass time (what with me living far away and all that). It was a pain. I remember the System Shock guy (Josh Randall, maybe) talking about how SS was the boss on the GUS.

Anyway, this is waffle of no real help. But the reminiscence is fun.

Zerker on 8/8/2014 at 21:34

Al_B, I used an (http://m-audio.com/products/en_us/Uno.html) M-Audio Uno. Did the job JUUST fine :).

Muzman, that's probably the main problem. Even when instruments are technically great, they often just sound weird if the song wasn't intended for that version of it. It was my understanding that a good number of DOS games targeted the Roland SoundCanvas SC-55, which is what I'm attempting to hunt down next. well, probably the SC-88, but that has an SC-55 mode, so it's essentially two modules in one!

Of course, there are certainly plenty of poorly tuned soundfonts out there :mad:

I also found this web site recently comparing certain midis with a whole series of different synths. I haven't downloaded anything yet to see, but it's an intriguing idea:
(http://www.wavetable.nl/?cat=4)

Phyphor on 9/8/2014 at 19:46

Quote Posted by demagogue

That's almost certainly the problem. USB does add a bit of overhead by itself, stack that with that of the software, and well...

Quote:

I actually don't know how to get the keyboard sounds to play off my PC.

Do you mean as in piping midi data from your PC to the keyboard with the intention of using the keyboard's synth to actually render the notes?
Depending on the keyboard model, you may have to set it to actually accept external MIDI input & pipe it through it's synth.

Quote Posted by Muzman

That's pretty much *every* General MIDI/MT32 based synth, ever. The way some instruments are played really does not lend itself well to wavetable based synthesis. Waveguide would have improved upon that quite a bit but by the time that was becoming feasible, there wasn't much point. Storage had advanced to the point that one could simply use MP3s & such and not bother with attempting to synthesize the music locally.

Quote:

They were actually too good for a lot of the game compositions you'd run into and despite being miles crisper and clearer it was fairly plain, when listening to some things through an old SB16, that the composer had specifically written the piece for all the ways the the old SB sound set didn't sound like the instruments they were supposed to be and the crappy amps compressed the mix etc.

A huge part of the problem there was that game companies at the time had to assume that most people didn't actually have a wavetable card present in their machine, so things tended to get composed with the Sound Blaster's OPL synth in mind. Sure, some games did actually have some great MIDIs for their soundtracks, but that tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

It's unfortunate, but while Soundblaster compatibility was a boon for game companies, it tended to kind of suck for the gamers who wanted higher quality music in their games.

*snip*

Quote:

I always liked all those weird options in the old DOS games and wondered what the heck they were. In audio stuff, for instance, every game is supporting this thing called the Gravis Ultrasound.

I had to laugh at this a bit. When the GUS actually came out, virtually nothing supported it. It took about 2 years before support really got started... 2 years of letter writing & email campaigns. Even then, the GUS wasn't really utilized properly, since most games that supported it tended to just use it like a Sound Blaster.

(A bit of explanation, a GUS was basically a hardware synth chip with RAM. To get it to play anything, one uploaded samples/sounds into the RAM and commanded the card to play the chosen sample (or sound) on a given channel, at a given panning & volume & pitch. The card could do up to 14 simultaneous voices in stereo at CD quality mixing, with a drop off for each voice added (so all 32 voices netted you about a 19Khz mixing rate, but by the time you had that many channels in use, you probably didn't notice. The card could do the mixing, interpolation, panning, volume scaling, etc with virtually no impact on CPU power, unlike Soundblaster type cards. Unfortunately, most games simply mixed the sound effects in software & DMA'd the result to the GUS & just played it as is, so there wasn't much advantage there. Music was a little different, one had to keep the instrument samples on your hard drive & the needed ones would be uploaded to the GUS's RAM & played according to the MIDI file. )

Quote:

I wondered what the heck that was. Never saw one in my life. Then again, sound cards of any sort were pretty unusual for a long ass time (what with me living far away and all that). It was a pain. I remember the System Shock guy (Josh Randall, maybe) talking about how SS was the boss on the GUS.

A LOT of stuff sounded awesome on the GUS. It's just that it never really caught on as a standard due to gaming companies not really wanting to invest massive amounts of time to utilize it to it's full potential. Not that I can blame them on that score.

Quote:

Anyway, this is waffle of no real help. But the reminiscence is fun.

It is. I certainly don't miss the aggravations of trying to get 2 or more sound cards to play nicely with each other (I was active in the demoscene in the mid 90s, so knowing how to code for multiple sound cards was pretty much a must, unless you just were lazy and supported SB only. )

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