@transcendentempress Oh thank you for boosting this one into my feed... this game holds a really special place for me. I remember playing it on our 286, with our SB compat sound card and VGA. Was the first game I ever finished, IIRC taking the "wits" path.
@sophie It was among the games which actually ran well on the 486 SX of my parents' then-computer, despite the CPU shortcomings, although I don't specifically recall how it sounded on the SB16 we had back then, especially now that I'm even more familiar with how it sounds with MIDI using SCUMMVM. I do recall though that I got the CD-ROM version in a French magazine, and it was bundled with also CD version of The Last Crusade.
@transcendentempress Oh wow! A lot of those games just don't sound right to me unless they're on AdLib music. I'm told many of the, especially LucasArts ones were designed for the Roland MT32, but the modern emulators for that... I have no idea if they're accurate... sound off to me.
Had an 8086, with a Green monitor, then the 286, at first with CGA, then eventually dad got a VGA card for it, then an 386SX-16, then the 486SX-25 which was like "whoa slow down". Eventually an Intel 80486DX2-66 Overdrive, and 2 weeks before be passed he handed me a Pentium 133 with 64Mb of RAM... which 2 years later I figured out was actually a p166 that had been downclocked to 133 (there was a jumper on the motherboard, I think for compatibility things running at the lower speed on the PCI or ISA bus)
@transcendentempress if I recall correctly, the SB16 had an OPL3 chip in it for midi audio, which was backwards compatible with OPL2 and 1, the upgrade being it could do it in stereo, so it would have sounded identical to the older AdLib and the OPL2 in the one I had. The digital sound would have sounded a tiny bit better than most, but Creative Labs, despite having a reputation for "good quality sound" actually made rather poor hardware, which was fine as we were all using terrible speakers back then. Some folks were still using PC Speaker, so it was amazingly good quality compared to what we were used to.
@sophie I have a Yamaha XG sound card, and a few years back I discovered a funny thing on Windows XP, if you stick to the base driver, the MIDI synth used is actually the OPL3 mode of the card. So if you use that with SCUMMVM, you can have some kind of true OPL3 hardware mode to play the MIDI tracks. 😄
Should give it a try again when I'll have time to redo my retro build.
1
