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[Ironbunny]

Ema Zamboni posted a video about old DOS games and their music with different timely sound cards. I myself remember playing these games with either a PC peeper with bleeding ears, Sound Blaster AWE 32 or Gravis Ultrasound (still have those with package and all). That era's golden system was of course Roland MT32 which always peeked its head in the configure menu's but most of us never knew what it actually sounded like. Well...watch the video and see how it sounded. Especially the Kings Quest, Police Quest 2 sound great.




additional info of MT32

 

[kruis]

I had all of those back in the day: AdLib, Sound Blaster, Gravis UltraSound, Roland MT32... Fun times ...

 

[RAIDEN1]

For a time before the rise of these sound cards the Amiga was the machine capable of great audio, straight out of the box, no additional sound card required, but saying that though there were instances where you couldn't get both SFX and music together for some of the games on that platform...

 

[Wildebeest]

How it sounded if you just had a stock Amiga and didn't have a rich dad who bought a studio grade Roland sound card.

 

[Ironbunny]

For a time before the rise of these sound cards the Amiga was the machine capable of great audio, straight out of the box, no additional sound card required, but saying that though there were instances where you couldn't get both SFX and music together for some of the games on that platform...

True. Amiga was amazing. Its altogether another rabbit hole to venture in youtube.

 

[Sintoid]

For a time before the rise of these sound cards the Amiga was the machine capable of great audio, straight out of the box, no additional sound card required, but saying that though there were instances where you couldn't get both SFX and music together for some of the games on that platform...

Yes, it was so much fun when my classmates with powerful 80286 with no soundcard came to my house and saw (and listened) Amiga
"How can you play with all that music??" They told me once

 

[Anthony Soprano]

Someone did rips of the Willy Beamish soundtrack playing off MT32 hardware in FLAC and it sounds amazing.

 

[ReBurn]

I remember being impressed with the RealSound that was used in Tex Murphy: Mean Streets to get digitized sound from the PC speaker in 1989. It was tinny sounding, but it was also funky.

 

[nkarafo]

Isn't "General Midi" in a more modern card/chip the same as an MT-32 or better?

 

[Ozzie666]

In 1990 I got a fully loaded PC with sound blaster just for Wing Commander and Origin System games in general. Still can hear it to this day. Coming from Amiga, I was used to good music. Some of my favourite audio was Wing Commander 3 and Day of the Tentacle. The cost though, ouch.

 

[dave_d]

Don't forget the Roland sound canvas. I think it wasn't as much as the mt32 but pretty close to as good.

 

[MrTroubleMaker]

Going from the onboard pc sound to the adlib card blew my mind at the time. But then years later I happen to get a mt32 cheap (it was a going out of sale pc store and it was used). I almost couldn't believe how much better it was, like night and day difference. I really had a strange feeling with the great generation ahead sound but still seeing pixelated graphics.

 

[ColonialRaptor]

Wow... I can only recall ever hearing any of these on the PC Speaker I never knew they had so much detail in the sound using other sound cards!

Cool video.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

A Sound Blaster AWE32 or AWE64 was not an expensive card. Back then few people knew the difference between FM synthesis and wave table synthesis

 

[Durin]

I had some Sound Blaster something card back in the day, and I do remember vaguely they really made a difference with certain games.

Seeing the back to back comparison though...absolute gulf of difference going from generic pc speaker to MT-32. Anything with trumpets and percussion you can make out so much more.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

It's such a shame that the dedicated sound card market died and people fellate endlessly over pixels but completely ignore the music. This is the same thing to playing something on a $1000 or $100,000 piano.

 

[MrA]

For a time before the rise of these sound cards the Amiga was the machine capable of great audio, straight out of the box, no additional sound card required, but saying that though there were instances where you couldn't get both SFX and music together for some of the games on that platform...

4 channels can do that
but even before the amiga the atari 400/800, commdore 64 and even the vic 20 had actual sound capabilities well before pcs started featuring decent sound

 

[NeverYouMind]

The Roland MT-32 sounds like a crappy Cassio synthesizer. Ad-Lib sounds good at times (Monkey Island) but sometimes it is used so poorly that PC speaker is better ( Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

How it sounded if you just had a stock Amiga and didn't have a rich dad who bought a studio grade Roland sound card.

This doesn't sound bad at all to me. But I can imagine the disappointment of playing on a computer and getting that kind of sound.

(Not so) fun fact: I have no clue what produced the sound in the PC we had at home in the early 90s, but I distinctly remember MI and Indy and the Last Crusade having music only in a handful of scenes. Pretty much only the title screen, the ending, and a few occasions such as the Indiana Jones jingle or the scene where Indy goes to Berlin to get the diary back. The rest was silence.