Re: Games I Play Only To Listen to the Music

On Sun, 20 Jul 2025 12:30:40 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:55:40 -0000 (UTC), in
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, Ant wrote:
>

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:43:46 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

>
Are there any games you fire up just for their tunes or am I the only
one who does this?
>

The original Descent. The opening music. Missions 1 and 2, the sample
track it plays when you're setting up sound is the best, even in OPL2.

>

Mission 12 is the demo track.

>

It's all good enough that I have the MIDI files to play in GM whenever I
like.

>
What players do you use to listen to MIDI files in GM?

>
VLC media player with Fluidsynth and then some choice SF2s
>
I have one called Hubbe64.sf2 (64MB) that is amazing. I don't have a link
for that, but I can post a Dropbox share if you want it. I have an insano
342MB GM soundfont that doesn't sound as good.
>
There is also eawpats.sf2 (32MB), which is a GM Gravis Ultrasound.
https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/3101

Because you know I just gotta do this...

<pedant>
EAWPATS isn't Gravis Ultrasound patches. Or, more precisely, it's a
'port' of patches made for Gravis Ultrasound, but it's not the ones
that were included with the soundcard from Gravis. EAWPATs was a
fan-made collection of patches designed to improve on the default
patches for Ultrasound (and EAWPATS.SF2 is a soundfont that copies
them into a format that could be used by the Sound Blaster AWE32 and
later other devices.

TL;DR: if you want to replicate the original sound of the Ultrasound,
don't use these. Try
https://archive.org/details/GravisUltrasoundClassicPachSetV1.6 if
that's your goal.

That said, EAWPAts is a good set of patches (and in fact the one I
default to when using TiMIDIty++) but it definitely is showing its
age. I tend to use the Timbres of Heaven set with Fluidity for most of
my MIDIng these days, myself.

</pedant>

The only thing I don't have is a Turtle Beach Rio soundfont. I wish I
could find one. They got better than SoundCanvas quality out of a 2MB
patch set. It's what I had as a daughtercard on my SB16. Those were the
days. Descent never sounded better.

It's been years and years but I seem to remember --back from my
alt.sounds.midi days-- that many of the Turtle Beach cards used the
same ROM patches as the Aztech soundcards, so you may wish to expand
your search to include those as well. But a lot of the cards of those
era were ROM-based rather than using soundfont files, which is why it
may be hard to find now. You'd first have to find the cards, then pull
the ROMs, then translate the ROM data into something compatible with
SoundFonts.

That said... have you seen
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=29648
(I mean, probably yes, you have, but just in case you missed it).
You'd still have to do some work to get them into soundfont format but
it's a start




By far the best MIDI I ever heard was from a Yamaha XG SoftSynth (I
can't remember which one) I had back in the Win9x days. It was pretty
expensive purchase, as I recall, but as a MIDI lover I _adored_ the
thing. Unfortunately, it was extremely finicky about the hardware/OS
it ran on, and it was a huge source of blue-screens-of-death.