Sun Apr 08, 2012 8:06 pm
All this midi talk makes me wish I had a Roland MT-32 back when I played Ultima VII and Ultima VII part 2 on my parents 386DX. We had a sound blaster, but the midi played back with very basic FM Synthesis. I played Ultima VII part 2 recently using exult with the sound pack with music recorded from a real Roland MT-32. The difference is night and day. The music just blew me away, with full orchestra, and synthesized back-up choir vocals. The MT-32 was released in 1987, and most Sierra games were able to use it back then. It didn't use samples. It synthesized everything in real-time with an Intel C8095-90 Control CPU and a Burr-Brown PCM54 DAC. Pretty impressive for it's time, and it still sounds more convincing than the SoundBlaster AWE32 which came out in 1994, which used wavetable samples loaded in on-board ram located on the soundcard. This is one of those things that makes me sad that digital audio playback came along in games, because there was more art and technical magic that went into the old games that relied on MIDI playback.
Change sucks