Question about sound in SS. General midi vs sound card for bgm.

charlestheoaf on 24/8/2006 at 05:19

Geeze. All I have in-game are a bunch of little beeps. No notes that hold sustain, fade away, and nothing that sounds remotely like a musical instrument. Just beeps. I'm going to have to change my configuration.

Qaladar on 24/8/2006 at 08:15

Drums and Bass Guitar still sound pathetically weak to my ear with Gravis emulation.

I wish I could record and put it up here but I don't know how as I'm not using DosBox.

*edit*

Hope this works... managed to capture via Camtasia. It fails to capture the video but that's ok as I only wanted to get the sound anyway.

(http://www.bellsouthpwp.net/j/w/jweso/sshock.avi) http://www.bellsouthpwp.net/j/w/jweso/sshock.avi

dvwjr on 25/8/2006 at 02:30

Quote Posted by Qaladar

Drums and Bass Guitar still sound pathetically weak to my ear with Gravis emulation.

The beauty of the Gravis Ultrasound (card and emulation) is that if you don't like a particular instrument - you can install a replacement patch file in the \ULTRASND sub-directory and change the entry in the ULTRASND.INI file and you have your new sound for whatever instrument. Other soundcards usually swap-out by soundbank - so substitution is a little more complicated...

Your sample of the WinXP MIDI (DirectMusic) sound like what I have on my WinXP (SP2) system - which makes sense as all the MIDI sound samples reside in the %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\gm.dls file.

Code:

The GM.DLS file on my WinXP (SP2) system:

08/29/2002 08:00AM 3,440,660 gm.dls

Quote:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
GMREADME.TXT
Copyright (c) 1998-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
------------

The GM.DLS file contains the Roland SoundCanvas Sound Set which is
protected under the following copyright:
Roland GS Sound Set/Microsoft (P) 1996 Roland Corporation U.S.
The Roland SoundCanvas Sound Set is licensed under Microsoft's
End User License Agreement for use with Microsoft operating
system products only. All other uses require a separate written
license from Roland.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

dvwjr

Qaladar on 25/8/2006 at 03:51

Nope I have a different version of gm.dls... August 18, 2001.

*shrug*

dvwjr on 25/8/2006 at 04:07

Quote Posted by Qaladar

Nope I have a different version of gm.dls... August 18, 2001.

*shrug*

What service pack level of WinXP are you running?

dvwjr

dvwjr on 26/8/2006 at 04:44

Quote Posted by charlestheoaf

Maybe you have the midi_card set to "PC Speaker"? :cheeky:

Proving once again that just because something can be done that it should be done - does not always hold true...

I give you the Dosbox v0.65 emulation of the SYSTEM SHOCK supported "PC Speaker" and "Tandy" music card selections.

Pre-Adlib FM:
Low-res video Intro sample: 2.05MB AVI (2:05) (11,025Hz mono)
(http://boxstr.com/files/919616_tdcsv/intro_pcspeaker.avi) PC Speaker 1-voice version: (Dosbox v0.65 PC Speaker emulation)

Low-res video Intro sample: 2.96MB AVI (2:06) (22,050Hz stereo)
(http://boxstr.com/files/919618_ajxjz/intro_tandy.avi) Tandy 3-voice version: (Dosbox v0.65 Tandy soundcard emulation)

Enjoy,

dvwjr

ToxicFrog on 30/8/2006 at 14:39

MIDI has been amply discussed by the rest of the thread, so I'll just toss in that in my experience, General MIDI gives you the best quality, which is consistent with the rest of this discussion
I would like the point out, however, that if you have an Audigy 2, you should be able to select Soundblaster 16 for audio, which will give you better sound quality.

money on 31/8/2006 at 22:24

I think SoundFX 2000 ((http://www.softsystem.co.uk/page4.html)) gives good music quality, better than the other midi synths mentioned.
Too bad you have to pay for it. :(

dvwjr on 7/12/2006 at 21:57

Added five additional AVI and Ogg files to my above posts to demonstrate the sounds of other Sound cards and MIDI synths. The SYSTEM SHOCK Introduction theme was used as the demonstration track. Also changed file-host references.

The Roland SCC-1A and VSC v3.23 seem to be "top dogs" for the MIDI selections. What say you?

dvwjr