Unleash Your Sound Blaster's Potential! Discover the Magic of Sound Banks!

@BitsundBolts
By way of an FYI, the differences between the Star Wars X-Wing games is the floppy VS CD versions. GOG sells the CD version of the game. Totally with you on the cut-scenes of the floppy version. I wish the GOG release contained both so we could choose which ever one we preferred. Sadly... EDIT: I think you can still find the floppy version on certain abandonware sites. Grab them so that if your floppy copies ever die you'll have spares.

Great! Now I must find myself a similar setup and try Bertayal at Krondor. Do you have any idea if this setup is affected by the CPU speed? I mean, can I use a P1@200 with the same results?

seems odd that they had some digital sounds and some synthesized sounds. It makes sense when it's 100% synthesized with just voices (like wing commander). But this doesn't make any sense. lol

some games sound worse with roland. I believe Tyrian is worse.

Check that any motherboard with a ISAPnP BIOS extension in firmware can initialize all the ISAPnP cards in the system. The CTCM part isn't needed in this case, only the CTCU /s... Unless you want to change the resources from DOS (aka, you don't want to install Windows95 to do it). UNISOUND can also directly initialize the card in this case.
In ISAPnP compliant motherboards, the changed resource map persist in a section of the firmware EEPROM.

There is also a generic ISAPnP manager for ISA cards made by Intel. You can install this to change the ISAPnP resources from DOS (but you don't want to install Windows95) and initialize all your ISAPnP hardware, not only the Creative cards. When Intel CM is installed, other card managers aren't needed, only the "card initializer" part, which in case of soundcards, for most brands can be replaced by UNISOUND completely.

for those who want to use soundfonts in later versions of windows/newer hardware; coolsoft's virtualmidisynth lets you load whatever soundfonts you want, toggle them on the fly, assign per channel, etc. not sound card dependent. i use the chaos 2.0 soundfont in it, assigned globally, works a treat, sounds phenomenal.

i cannot recommend this util enough, it's a game changer.

lol monkey island sounds like stranger things now.

GUS generally sounds the best, but some of the notes sound out of tune to me.

i have AwaveStudio, so i converted the windows default general midi bank GM.DLS to a SBK file in a few mouse clicks, cant tell if it will work with Awe32, and its around 3.2 MB

The fact that you get a content match for the Monkey Island theme tune but not the Star Wars theme tune is funny

ok GUS does not work on monkey. YUCK!!! lol

in xwing if programmers were savy enough they could technically make theyre own sound fonts that auto load (or load by the user) on compatybile soundcards to make every game sound the same regardless of a soundcard, but the general midi i remember sounded on every computer completly different

Great, will try this on my AWE32!

Having had an AWE32 with 8MB I never got why games that supported it didn't include a sound bank of their own with the perfect sounds for said game. It's literally just a collection of sound samples that can be played with midi notes.

MT32 bank: when a welder welds a piano

i got a bad experience with the first model of Awe32 with missing pin on expension ram riser and soundbank cannot be loaded in easily, in RMA get the awe32 rev and not work flowly with my driver worst money spend.

Very interesting!

There`s no good emulatiin of mt-32, it`s all crap, unless you have the real thing, or Munt.

X-Wing was the very first game I played after getting my own Sound Blaster card. I remember the experience being something of a mixed bag. The SFX were great; Genuine Star Wars-y sounds playing out of a home computer was a novel and pretty thrilling experience back then. But I didn't understand the difference between wavetable and FM synth at the time, and I was pretty disappointed at the quality of the in-game music.

Perfect video Very informative! hard to find those cards

FYI: X-Wing did not support soft mixing of digital sound, and the DAC on the Sound Blaster card could only play one stream at a time. In cases where two sampled sound effects (TIE Engines, lasers firing, dialog, etc) should be heard at the same time, only one would play from the DAC, and a stand-in for the other one would play from the music hardware. This was pretty common practice in early DOS games that supported both MIDI/FM synth and sampled sound effects.

Великолепный разбор типов звука ❤ благодарю вас, огромная работа проделана!!! ❤❤❤

There was an old PC demo called Amnesia by Renaissance whose intro soundtrack blew my mind on my SoundBlaster 16. It mixed FM and mod like digital mixing for the music to give realistic sounding violins. Check it out sometime.

Another thing that occurred to me is the reason why the intros are different between the GOG version and the floppy version. If you have a look at the installer screen, you'll see you have the machine speed set to slow. That setting disabled a bunch of cutscene animations and lowers the in-game detail, so it'll run better on a slow 386. Set that to fast and you'll get all the animations back.

I'll bet that if you load the Roland sound bank and then run the game in general midi mode it would sound a lot better. The Roland's instrument map was different and I don't think they would have mapped it to the actual hardware since not a whole lot of games used it. I had an mt32 at the time and that sounded nothing like what the actual hardware sounds like.

I loved my AWE32 ASP back in the days

Unisound doesn't support loading soundfonts. Edit: According to the author.

I would love to hear the FANTAGM2 soundbank 😅

An interesting investigation, as always! I didn't dabble in it myself at the time, but I had a friend (who was also a bit musically inclined) who told me sound banks are the bees knees. I never really saw the point for gaming. My impression now is largely the same as then - objectively better at best, but fiddly and different to what I was used to, thus not really preferred by a creature of habit like me. Completely nonsensical at worst. Had I heard the best version first, I'd probably have seen it the other way around now though. 😄

I have Roland LAPC-I and intro on Xwing is the best in my opinion. Very close to the original music. AWE with that much RAM will be best to play multichannel mod/xm/s3m files even on slow 386.

Seems like a mismatch between this card and this game. It's obvious the game was never designed with fully sampled MIDI instruments in mind. Staying with the FM synth will be more faithful to the original intent.

I'd really like to see how this card is setup in Windows 95. Seems like the DOS drivers were an after thought.

why don't you use norton commander ? It makes working under DOS very easy

The onboard memory is located right above the eeprom.

Wanted to hear the fantagm2. 😊

Man, that xylophone is really going to town in Roland mode XD

If I had experienced this as a kid instead of an Apple computer, this could have gotten me more into PCs as a whole! I am a X86/X64 enthusiast after I became an adult, but this could have gotten the bug started much earlier! When I was a kid, I remember how great X-Wing looked, but the PC speaker sounds were annoying, I was already used to the Super Nintendo. I do have to say however, dealing with PC hardware from back in my childhood days vs getting into PC hardware when I was already an adult, I took the easy mode route. Windows XP Service Pack 1 was out and mature, Service Pack 2 was just around the corner, and hardware plug-and-play was pretty well figured out. Was still a way more interesting time in hardware than now though, because at least back then overclocking was more fun. My last upgrade, to an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X was the last time I really did any overclocking, my current Ryzen 5 5600X, I just let PBO do the work and I just clocked the RAM to its full 3600MHz clock speed. I do have to say, yes, we have more realistic sound now, but games having their own unique sound could be awesome. You could hear a bit of music or a sound effect and be transported back instantly.

SB AWE 32 is not bad card, if you have enough SIM RAM, and somebody will make really good GM/GS bank from EMU Proteus, or Roland Sound Canvas 88Pro samples (or even higher level use samples from Roland Sampler CDs). With Roland MT-32 mode emulation it is much more complex topic, as real MT32 is using synth engine, which is combining early Virtual Analogue synth with sampled attacks of instruments, this gives to him quite flexibility of reprogramming it via MIDI sysex, and as many games are using these custom programs (patches), then these games sound totally off with basic emulation, which is emulating only basic default MT-32 bank. 🙂

Я теж маю 32 PnP, але досі не знав на що вона здатна в плані саундбанків, дякую, відмінне відео!

did this back in 1999.

The SB32 had no internal memory, only the SB AWE32 came with 512 kB on-board memory. The reason why you can load the GM soundbank file is that the 32 kB GM soundbank file actually contains no sample data at all, it just contains parameters. The GM sound data is in the ROM of the soundcard and thus always present. A soundank file contains parameters and optional samples. The parameters can always be loaded, they require no sample memory, they just configure values on the chip. Only samples require memory to be installed. When you load the GM soundbank file, it configures the card for GM playback and switches to the samples in the ROM. When you try to load any other soundbank file, it tries to load sample data to RAM and then sets parameters for those sample data but that won't work unless there is RAM for the samples available.

Copyright laws are a cancer of humanity.

If you want to have an alphabetically sorted directory and file listing, when typing 'dir', I recommend putting this line in autoexec.bat: set dircmd=/o:gne

There aren't many games that work well with a MT32 sound bank. There are some but most games require 100% MT32 sysex compatibility allowing the game to program new sounds into the MT32. If a game supports general midi music that is the best choice if it doesn't natively support AWE.

Note that the sbk files are stored in the SFBANK Directory meaning Sound Font BANK. Creative was already calling them Sound Fonts at this time. For Sound Font version 2 they changed to the SF2 extension. The Windows drivers supported loading user supplied Version 1 SBK sound fonts and Version 2 SF2 sound Fonts and would tell you how much Sample memory was used.

You have checked GM and MT32 sound banks. And what about GS (General Standard) sound bank in X-Wing GM mode?

Monkey Island will never sound good using a GM soundbank, it only supports Roland MT32

Listening to this made me realise that a LOT of the Space Quest V soundtrack pays homage to Star Wars.

Another good vid :). Some of my favorite games from back in the day, remember to set machine speed to fast in the Install menu for X-Wing. I believe that GUS file to be some sort of Gravis Ultrasound Midi file. I played these games back in the day on my new 486 DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound MAX with Midi and Sound blaster emulation activated, card had 1 MB of space for Midi patches, those came on 3.5" disks with the card. Still have the card and the disks.

There was an down arrow on the B-Wing Tour of Duty Installation Program indicating there are even more options 8 initially displayed. Meaning there was and option below "General MIDI with SoundBlaster," I am curious as to what those options were! LOL!