Where are the MIDI files?

[Dark Fox]

I own a Roland SC-88 MIDI Synthesizer that I have hooked up to my machine. With the original MIDI files, it plays a far superior quality of audio than the .ogg files that are duct tape to this game from the Windows General MIDI audio it was recorded from. Is there any way to play the actual .mid files from the original game in Megaton edition?

[Lunick]

The midi files can be located with duke3d.grp but, Megaton only plays OGG files.

Also, the OGG files were recorded from a real SC-55 machine which all the tracks (except Grabbag, I think) are designed for, not from Windows itself.

[Roxor128]

Only supports OGG? Bah! Another developer fallen into the space-wasting trap of prerecording the music.

It'd be much better to use the original MIDI files and put them through a soundfont-based synth. Give everyone a choice of which patch set to use for playback, and save buckets of disk space in the process.

I'm listening to the original MIDI files with an OPL2 patch set in XMPlay right now. Yes, OPL2. Old-school FM sound. Sounds great.

[Lunick]

Origineel geplaatst door Roxor128:

It'd be much better to use the original MIDI files and put them through a soundfont-based synth.

That would probably be ideal but I have yet to come across a soundfont that sounds exactly like the ogg recordings the game is currently included with.

[Roxor128]

Origineel geplaatst door Tek_Lynx:

Emulated Adlib and OPL-3 Sounds meh if you have actually heard the real thing.
It only sounds decent on real hardware.

I no longer have my old 486 and SB16. Emulation is all I've got these days. :-(

Given the OPL2 and OPL3 chips are entirely digital, it is in principle possible to exactly emulate them in software, giving the same output bitstream the original chip would have produced for a given input command sequence. Yes, I know they used a proprietary floating-point format for their output, so you'd have to convert it to IEEE floating-point before handing it off to the OS for output.

I'd hate to think how hard emulation of chips with analogue components would be.

I do agree that the port should of used the midi files and not recordings of them.

You mean "should've", not "should of". :-)

And yes, recordings are a very brute-force approach to the problem of music playback.