[slightly OT] U7 and Roland MT-32 discovery

[artaxerxes]

Hey all,

if you have legal access to the MT-32 ROMS, especially MT32_CONTROL.ROM and MT32_PCM.ROM, you can find and install the mt32emu package and instruct Dosbox to use this newly added MIDI conversion port. As a result, you can play all the great games of old (Might and Magic, Dune, Legend of Kyrandia, and naturally Ultima and many more) using a pretty close Roland emulation. I know that for Exult, we already have plenty of music packs for it's not as cool, however, my jaw dropped when I heard Might and Magic III (this is NOT _Heroes_ of MaM) in Roland mode. It was UNBELIEVABLE.

The instruction were found on http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-728989.html

In short:
1) Download the mt32emu from http://theli.ho.com.ua/mt32/mt32emu-0.1 ... 04.tar.bz2, extract, compile and install it.
2) Find out your MIDI port (normally 128:0) by running:
$ cat /proc/asound/seq/clients | grep MT-32 -A 2
This should return:
Client 128 : "MT-32" [User]
Port 0 : "Standard" (-We-)
Port 1 : "GM Emulation" (-We-)
(which confirms that your newly connected MIDI port is 128:0)
3) setup dosbox.conf, in particular the MIDI section like so:
[midi]
mpu401=intelligent
device=default
config=128:0
4) launch dosbox and setup your game to use Roland as a soundcard

Enjoy
Artaxerxes

[Dominus]

he he Artaxerxes, under which stone have you hidden? This is really old news, AFAIK Exult even has code from the munt project, and canmake use of those ROMS as well, if support is coded in. (I could be wrong, though, I think Colourless added this sometime after 1.2 when he rewrote the sound system).

Also take the emulation with a grain of salt, supposedly the emulation has still error at times and has not been changed in ages (as you can see by the linked source). Good information on this project can be found at its kind of official forum at http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php?c=12

This kind of lead me to buy first a real Mt-32 on ebay and then a CM-64 (a CM-32 would have been enough but I couldn't find one at the time) to have the more advanced sound in Ultima Underworld.

But thanks for bringing this to attention again, I didn't want to belittle your post!

[marzo]

AFAIK Exult even has code from the munt project

Indeed: Exult has a full copy of Munt (latest version) included in the source tree. You have to compile Exult with support for it (pass "--enable-mt32emu" to ./configure in *nix or add "-DMT32EMU" to "EXTRA_OPTIONS" in 'makeifle.mingw' in Windows) and put the ROMS in the "data" dir. Exult will only play the music through the MT32, though, not the SFX (mainly due to BG -- its SFX data is apparently all hardcoded, whereas SI's SFX are complete and could be played that way with some code changes).

[Dominus]

We can blame it all on the poor documentation and thus on that lazy documentation writer...

[artaxerxes]

Dominus (on the run) wrote:
> This is really old news, AFAIK Exult even has code from the munt
> project, and canmake use of those ROMS as well, if support is
> coded in. (I could be wrong, though, I think Colourless added
> this sometime after 1.2 when he rewrote the sound system).

True. However, I made sure to say "U7" in the title and not Exult for that reason. Exult has had fantastic sounds for a while now, but when/if I played U7 using Dosbox, I would get only the SB emulation which is nothing compared to Roland.

> Also take the emulation with a grain of salt, supposedly the
> emulation has still error at times and has not been changed
> in ages (as you can see by the linked source).

This is true. On the vogon forum, there is a post where one can compare the true MT32 version with the emulated one for Kyrandia and while the emulation does a good job, it's not 100% faithful to the original.

> This kind of lead me to buy first a real Mt-32 on ebay and
> then a CM-64 (a CM-32 would have been enough but I couldn't
> find one at the time) to have the more advanced sound in
> Ultima Underworld.

I couldn't get UW to use emulation. Maybe I missed something in my setup...

> But thanks for bringing this to attention again, I didn't
> want to belittle your post!

No worries. I expected a bit of rustle since it was not exactly Exult-related (hence the subject line). But if this post helped anyone get better sound for their Dosbox experience, then I don't feel bad at all!

Artaxerxes (silent but here every day)