Fun fact: Dune uses the HERAD (HERbulot ADlib) sound system created by Remi Herbulot, and the soundtrack was written by Stephane Picq. These two were absolute technical masters of FM synthesis. HERAD is the only sound engine which implements the full feature set of the OPL2 chip, there is functionality which HERAD exposes that just isn't possible anywhere else. The games KGB and MegaRace also use HERAD. The only other person who I think even approaches this greatness is Bobby Prince who wrote the Doom soundtrack, he really knew his way around the Roland SC-55 and Yamaha OPL, being one of the very few PC music composers who bothered to vary the instruments instead of using the pre-made instrument set.
That was a great comprehensive overview of the main audio enhancements we've introduced to DOSBox Staging lately! Congrats again, and I'm glad to see you enjoy using "our product" 😎🎧 I particularly liked that you mentioned the mighty Roland D-50, and I've finally learned what the number 32 in the name of the Roland CM-32L represents! I got a good chuckle out of watching the Elite Plus example; not only do we get SOUND in space, now there's REVERB too! 🤯 I 100% agree on the need for the ability to easily adjust the mixer levels while playing a game; it's one of my long-standing pain-points. Well, I guess it's not much of a secret anymore that OSD (On-Screen Display) and On-Screen Notification support is coming to DOSBox Staging in the foreseeable future (think of the user interface of a TV, a modern console, or one of the more polished console emulators). That will include many exciting things, such as a vastly improved keymapper and (drumroll! 🥁) a brand new mixer! Yikes! Stay tuned! 😎🤘
I've been following your videos for many years and this is the first time I've seen you in person. (or at least its image). you are a legend of retro computing. Greetings from Brazil
Great showcase Phil! I love my old hardware, but I also love where we are at with emulation. The work of all these devs is how the DOS era will be preserved forever.
Discovered this channel and your videos about DosBox (which I've used in the past) and your ultimate 386 gaming PC.. Great! So much fun to watch. Gives me a warm and nostalgic feeling inside.. ; ) When I was young, 486 was my main childhood computer. Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Commander Keen, etc.. We only had PC Speaker sound, but I loved it. But was always a bit jealous when I came over at friends with glorious Sound Blaster and speakers. Makes it sound extra nostalgic and mysterious now.
I had the Tandy 1000EX, and at the time had no idea most IBM compatible computers sounded so bad. When Sim Earth came out and required a hard drive, a family friend helped us build a clone to get us on the standard parts path. For a few months games sounded worse, but when the Sound Blaster came out we ordered one.
I got to the end of the vid and was like "where's the Dosbox sounds?" Then realised that it was Dosbox all the way though and not the cards he was holding up, damn those sounds are accurate.
Great video Phil! I would say this is the best way to experience the old software we still love without the issues and cost of having original hardware. As much as I love my old equipment it is such a lovely experience having the games and music applications (trackers) load exceptionally fast and work and sound great. I also liked the comment regarding the lifetime key with the Roland VA SoundCanvas VST "How long will that lifetime key last", this is exactly what I said to them as it needs to keep reauthorizing every 30 days, if they turn the server off I am left with nothing... With regards to the sound, the DOSBOX Staging team are going to keep upgrading the sound so that if you select a SB1.0 or SB16 etc it will sound as close as possible to that card as possible (filter/frequency curve), something to look forward to but it already sounds more or less perfect.
You are committed to the community as far as you can go, thank you! Install on Mint doesn't work but I'll give it a go this weekend. It may have solved my dosbox issues.
G'day Phil, Ah the memories of playing Lemmings, especially when you get stuck & frustrated with a level so just let out all 100 & turn them into exploders to watch them go off like Popcorn 😂
There is a free and legal (but not open source) alternative to the Roland Sound Canvas VA software. Cakewalk is free and includes a MIDI synth called TTS-1 which just so happens to have licensed the real Sound Canvas instrument set from Roland, it sounds identical. Expect to spend 30-60 mins getting it up and running though. I installed it a few years ago thanks to a RUclips video I saw, I tested it with DosBox and PrBoom-plus and it worked great. NB: This synth and parts of Cakewalk are really old, my retro gaming PC runs Windows 7 x64 so YMMV. If you have any problems consider running it in a virtual machine.
No matter how many times I hear the Roland MT-32 I'll never get over how incredible games sound with it. It's my dream dos hardware piece, but I would need to win the lottery to be able to afford one. Dosbox staging has made some enormous improvements, massive kudos should go to the team working on it cause these new features are amazing.
19:17 Oh my god... that hit me hard! Privateer was one of the greatest games of my youth. Thank you for the video. I might look this up and revisit some old games :-)
Like many other youngsters I had no access to MT-32 or SC-55 in the early 90s and I had to settle for SoundBlaster clone. But in the early 2000 all those Roland MIDI modules and Gravis Ultrasound cards were dirt cheap and I finally got several of them when DOS gaming was not hip anymore. Everybody was dumping ISA sound cards in favor of Windows 98/XP compatible PCI sound cards and EAX or A3D surround. Now I have LAPC-I, MT-32, SC-55, GUS Extreme and loads of different SoundBlasters and their clone cards. I love my old stuff but I'm still super happy that everyone else can hear those glorious MIDI and FM sounds in emulation as they sounded back in the good ole days. No need to spend fortunes in old hardware!
@@philscomputerlab Yup. There is a curve for all hardware where it is first brand new, popular and expensive, then dated, unpopular and dirt cheap and finally expensive again because of rarity and nostalgia. Logically we should always buy in the low curve but irony is that there is a reason it's dirt cheap: nobody really wants it right then and there. Very few people usually notice or bother to hoard that stuff at the right moment. I guess "after 10-20 years I'll probably value it more!" is too much of a stretch for us. Especially when we were in our 20s and were blinded by rapid technological advancement.
I emulate my DOS games and I have to say the future is looking bright. Now, I wish there was some technology that perfectly emulated the CRT experience.
the closest I've been getting to obtaining that extra-crisp bright vivid colorful sharp definition is to use ReShade (in the games that support it) For example Doom... there should be a way of running ReShade with dosbox, never tested it... try with different dosbox renderers (ddraw, opengl, direct3d)
I was blown away by the voice sample of Mach3 when I first played it on my AT-clone (IPC) with only a PC speaker. It was a business only setup, but since my father worked as a city planner, he required high-resolution graphics with as much colours as possible, so while my sound experience was quite poor, the graphics were astounding for a late 80's PC-compatible :-D. Now I own both the Roland MT-32 and the Sound Canvas 55 to have a great MIDI experience whenever I feel the urge to fire up some classics that support it. Just hold while I insert another buckazoid...
With some clever programming and 100% deticated cpu usage, you could actually play sampled digital audio on your 8088/80286 PC speaker. There are some other games that also used this technique. Battle Chess and some golf game from that time is what I can remember.
Fortunately, emulations are getting better every year. I'm a big fan of the real thing myself, but I certainly can't get the flexibility that emulation gives me when using my old hardware. Thanks for the many years of interesting content.
thanks for all your hard work this is amazing i can't wait for tinkering and experiment with many of my childhood games especially Descent i have some old hardware but this sure helps to preserve so many memories and the spirit of the time
Remember to check what version has the best compatibility with the games you'd like to play. The old version and the later version have subtle differences in sound. The old version also lacks a headphone jack, so if that's important for you go for the newer model. If you find a CM-500, go for that one instead, but it has been rare as hen's teeth these days and stupidly expensive, so...
@@LarixusSnydes CM-500 is nice in theory since it has GM built in, but you'll need to mod the hardware a bit if you want to fix the MT-32 vibrato speed.
@@ozzyp97 Good to know, but this module is getting extremely rare with prices to match, so I don't see myself performing the vibrato mod on them anytime soon😉
Thanks for another great vid Phil and promoting DosBox as an option in case you don't have the retro HW. Anyway like you said no emulator can replace the joy of dealing with your own physical, noisy AT or ATX retro machine :) For me the way of bringing my preferred Gravis MIDI sound flavour into the Pentium IV Win98 machine (=no ISA slot) was instaling Gravis PAT compiled as 32 MB sound font for SB Live 5.1. Now I have both the Reverb from SB and the sounding of Gravis which is awesome :)
@@TheRonHockman Thanks for the answer. I didn't expect those websites to also track such old games. I also didn't expect 14 to 20 hours for Descent, wow.
I'm definitely going to have to try this. One of the things mainline DOSBox can't handle is how Wizardry 6 and 7 drive the OPL chip, resulting in very glitchy sound. I followed your guide to set up my main PC as a virtual midi synth with the Roland CM-64, SC-55, Yamaha XG, and 2 different sound fonts. Arachno is one of them. I forget the name of the other, but it's huge! But that doesn't necessarily mean better. I do have a physical CM-64, but it's in storage. Don't really have the space to set up a stack of 3 midi modules and switches. Just like I don't really have the space for multiple machines. I've been very impressed with the quality of emulation these days, having followed it since the mid 90s. Now, if only a flavor of DOSBox would add EMU8000 support to fully emulate an AWE32/64, I would be very happy. As it is, I can use PCem or 86Box for that.
I deleted my previous comment that the sound problems in Wizardry 6 persist even with Nuked OPL. My copy of the game was from GOG, which configures it for PC speaker and does not include the installer needed to change the settings. Fortunately, I also have the Ultimate Wizardry Archives CD, which does have the installer. Once I changed the settings, it sounded perfect!
Great video with the latest options, love how it's getting REALLY close to the original experience, minus the signal noise and driver setup hassle. I have a lot of the original hardware (AWE 64 Gold, MT32, SC155), and I am really interested how close it actually is. I might do some comparisons myself to see if I can hear the difference, or measure it in any way.
Yeah, I've been trying to get my hands on a Sound Blaster Pro 1, and it's actually harder to find than a SB 2.0 (non-pro). I've literally got handful of the latter that I've picked up over the years whenever I've seen them going for a reasonable price, but I've only seen a few SB Pro 1 cards and they've all been asking or selling for crazy prices. I've seen more of the original SB 1.0 cards go up than SB Pro 1 cards. That Adlib gold card sounds awesome in Dune, I loved that game growing up and it's pretty awesome to hear it in stereo! Ultima VI sounds pretty awesome coming out of a SID too. I'm glad I spent the money to buy a bunch of gear (including among others a MT-32 and SC-55 MkII, both of which I never had growing up). but honestly it seems so much easier to just use DOSBox Staging. If I were getting into retro computing today, I wouldn't bother with real hardware, I'd just use this instead. And even $69 (presumably yankee bucks?) for a SC lifetime key is pretty great compared to what they're selling for these days. Anyway, it was fun to see all the different options for sound in retro games. I'm more into a big electronics phase at the moment, and I don't really have room for both hobbies, so it's great to see there's some great options for getting a real retro sound out of a modern emulator (especially since I'm running a mac as my daily driver these days).
Very cool stuff. 🙂 My first add in sound card, from 1992-1995, was a Pro Audio Spectrum by Media Vision. That's the card I played most of the games in this video on. It emulated Sound Blaster but also had its own mode that a small number of games supported.
I played soo much of Bodukan when I was young. I had a IBM computer with a internal speaker. I would never imagine that the game had such sound using the Roland 😊
This is really cool. I do just like seeing my MT-32 or MU-1000 do their thing while they play music back or the silly message that some games put on the MT-32's screen. If I didn't already have the MT-32, I'd gladly emulate it. I just lucked out and bought one years ago because I'd always wanted one as a kid. It was before the prices really went nuts-- I'd never spend what most people are asking for them now. Same is true for my SCB-55, sw1000xg, SW60xg, DB50xg, AWE32... I just kind of liked to try different MIDI dodads when they were fading from popularity and just scooped them up (a couple of them I bought new, though). So I'm kind of lucky in that I can play games with different modules just to hear what they sound like, but Staging sounds amazing! I mean, I might have to finally semi-retire my real DOS machine and give it a shot. Thanks for the video!
Yeah, that is one downside of wmulation, or even the wavetable upgrades. Though there is the nice convenience of not having to track all the cables needed for the MT-32. I have one of those and an SC-88 pro, but nice to just use the Orpheus II and X2GS set up I got recently!
@@slaapliedje Funny you should bump this. I was bored the other day and finally gave Stages and Munt a go. Damn. Munt is *really* good. I have an early (no headphone jack) MT-32, and it is pretty nice to play some demanding tracks without clipping, dropped instruments, but still true-to-original instrument sounds. It even has an emulated display that I keep open on another screen. Years ago, I didn't think the MT-32 would ever be emulated (early on because of complexity and then because of a lack of interest), but here we are. I can also just route MIDI to my USB-connected MU-1000 in Win10. My DOS machine became even more niche. I'm thinking about an SC-8850 now, though :D
Great video, Phil. I am also from the same era like you with my 386dx40, but i never had the full overview of all that multiple sound options. I would also go with a soundblaster 16 and a soundcanvas for midi, which i can also use with my Atari St.
It can record the audio ouput into a WAV file, the MIDI output into a MID file, and the raw data sent to the OPL chip you can play back with special OPL music players.
In my opinion, audio is definitively better through emulation. Original sound cards are buggy and noisy, and the emulated version is just the same thing, but better. There are extremely strong arguments in favor of original hardware regarding video output (CRT motion sensation, completely different looks, input lag) but I don't think the same can be applied to sound. That being said, there is a market for vinyl enthusiasts, so if there are people who prefer to hear their music with scratches and noise, perhaps the same thing exists in retro gaming.
The attention to detail in sound emulation in dosbox-staging is next level. Now, when it comes to GM, I use the fatboy soundfont. It sounds great for pretty anything I've used it for.
I was awestruck when I first heard Roland MT-32 music. I even remember it to this day. I came to a computer shop where I previously bought my first PC. I wanted to replace my first tiny computer loudspeakers for my Sound Blaster compatible sound card (*It was Aztech PRO 16 really) for something a little bit better and the guys there were testing MT-32 with some Sierra and Lucas Arts games they had. It was also the first time they had it in their shop, so they were also quite excited and gathered around it. I remember I stayed there for like an hour listening to all the tunes, some of which I had heard on my Aztech before and I was like: "Dudes, forget the loudspeakers I came for, I want this awesome magical music box you have here!!!" And they were like, ha-ha, dude, sure, hope you brought a bunch of green paper with you, cause it ain't cheap, chief". And then they told me the price. lol
I have an SC-155 which I am learning to use at the moment, whether for pc dos games(connected to soundblaster Audigy card & rack), as with my other instruments such as the Rm1x, the CS10 keyboard, and the Korg Volca bass all recorded on AW16G managing analog multitrack and midi. I have been at the start for a few months, but I have already been able to take advantage of the SC-155's multitrack allowing existing music to create variations, really cool.
I remember it back in that days. Nobody of us know how MT-32 actually sounds like, we have been only speculating, so therefore it was such as huge surprise when I have got one later on. It couldn't be emulated via soundfonts (only it's basic presets), as in reality it was virtual analogue synth + PCM with "endless" programmability. SB AWE 32/64 had literally awful basic 1MB ROM GM bank, there was a huge potential in dos games to use it's standard 512KB RAM for custom patches-samples, but I don't remember any single games to utilize it (maybe FFVII). Gravis Ultrasound I remember as super amazing for trackers (MOD, S3M, etc..), it sounds quite warm and natural, however for MIDI it was useless a it didn't had Reverb/ Chorus effect processor. Yamaha XG was phenomenal standard with amazing effects and filters, I always wanted SW1000XG, after I heard SW50XG and XG MIDI I was totally sold on it, later on I manage to get MU100R, anyway it have also GM/GS emulation mode and also "MT-32" preset bank emulation. Anyway best fun is if you try DOS games (GM/GS MIDI) with profi class synth modules like Yamaha Motif-RACK or Roland Fantom XR, it doesn't matter how big soundfont your will upload into DOSBOX these two will blow it out of water.
You pretty much nailed it. The hardware is really expensive and if you lucky to have the MT32 ROM's, you all set. As a kid I remember that I was "over the moon" when the first AWE cards supported MT32 emulation. It worked for a bit and would then just lock-up horribly but I missioned through that. The Ensoniq SoundScape to me was also a beautiful card (GM Support) but the Sound Blaster support just was not there. My Dosbox emulation is here right next to my DCS world so I'm happier then a pig-in-poo.
back when the PC speaker was king, this top level Midi audio, was a valuable, but it was top level musicians/audio, kit, audio recording setup stuff, not the sort kit you would of had laying around next even a game PC back then if there was such a thing, PC where expected to do a lot more than just play games,
@@dh2032 Yup. And as a kid, you see the options in the game setup, you do research on what it is and find out how much it costs, your heart just sank into your shoes. I only heard the MT32 for the first time in 1993 and I was blown away.
I'm wondering what Soundfont the Yamaha PSR-450 used, love how some things sound on it but kind of lazy to always have it standing around somewhere and would love to reproduce and test things out in an emulator first.
I have a PSR530 here and it sounds eerily similar to the 4MB kit S-YXG50. I would say the S-YXG interpretation is a little rougher and crunchier in reverb and chorus, seems to me like, but it's the same samples. I think given you have access to 480 XG patches on the 450, just like on the 530, it's a possibility that you have the same ROM, you should check whether it sounds like that, or more similar to newer ones like S-YXG2006LE. Thing with 2006 though is that it's incomplete and a little broken, so if your sounds don't match the S-YXG50, you basically have no decent emulator to use. I still have my issues with you personally though. You should apologise.
Thank you for the analysis. My only comment is how beautiful that background is, Another World is a masterpiece. P.S. on eBay news, recently surfaced a sealed/boxed GF4Ti 4600, the bid closed on $1200. (pretty much nonexistent item)
Great video as always, Phil! Your coverage on these sorts of things always goes above and beyond! Since your first video I've been tinkering with DosBox Staging, and I am incredibly impressed especially with a 4K monitor and the fakelottes.tweaked shader. For Sound Canvas VA and the Yamaha S-YXG50 VST's, what host program do you use? Still SAVIHost or did you find something else?
Hi, I'm not Phil, but I use SAVIHost and am quite happy with it. It has both 32 and 64 bit versions so you can host either 32 or 64-bit VST plugins, which is very nice. Its record feature can come in handy too.
Thanks for sharing this with us Phil. It comes to my mind, what if you make a game recomendation video? As in, for those of us who want to get into retro gaming (particularly DOS and Win98, early 2000s perhaps), what games would you recommend? Also, you have a lot of videos putting together PCs, but do you think it's possible that in the future you make a dummy guide to retro gaming? The dos and dont's, tips, useful resources, that could make for a neat video. Thanks for the great work!
Sooner than later I'm going to have to learn to use Dosbox. Having to say goodbye to original hardware as it fails from age is hard and using the old stuff daily it's just a matter of time. I'm going to definitely get into this this week while on holliday.
Great video! Someday can you also do some tests with dosbox-x? I never know the difference in terms of sound emulation capabilities between all the dosbox flavors.
I have a DOS/Win98 pc but I find I'm not using it much. I've been using dosbox and recently dosbox-x (much easier to use). Also stumbled onto exodos. So convenient.
From memory it all sound accurate to my ears, and I have been around since the PC Speaker/ZX Spectrum/Amiga 2000 days. Although indeed with the small touches it sounds better than they did original. First soundcard was a SB Pro 2 followed by a SB AWE64, than a Live! and X-Fi was the last one. To be honest, Creative has been getting a bigger and bigger pain in the behind driver wise to the point that I stopped bothering buying a soundcard altogether.
Somewhere in my closet I know I have an SB AWE 64 Gold. That thing was soooo good for its time. Moved from it to an XFI card from what I remember (which I also still have somewhere).
Excellent video comparison!!! Many of the sound cards I had only heard at that time, because they were too expensive to buy (just for gaming). Recently I watched a whole Space Quest III longplay just to enjoy how it sounds on real Roland 32. It seems with this new DOSBox Staging I could experience it for myself - the way it was meant to be.
It's great indeed! I still prefer my eMac and a real MT32 but wonderful application. You can mix MT-32 for music and Soundblaster for FX in some games. Dosbox Staging supports HiDpi on Macs by the way, 1280x720 HiDpi looks great with the right scanlines shader."
Great CRT filter. Looks very nice, does DOSBox Staging also includes it? I myself play DOS games on a real CRT display, but I really dig this filter (if something happens to my CRT, I can imagine myself playing with such a filter w/o much struggle)
It has the filter stored in C:\Program Files\DOSBox Staging esources\glshaders and for me, I had to copy them into \AppData\Local\DOSBox\glshaders. You can also download them from github.com/tyrells/dosbox-svn-shaders
@@philscomputerlabYou shouldn't need to copy shaders, DOSBox looks for the bundled ones in the resources folder by default. Also, downloading them from Tyrell's repo is not recommended, as we've made several improvements to them, but Tyrell is no longer maintaining that repo therefore did not update his originals with our improvements. Just use our bundled ones for best result (e.g. his originals break on some OS and GPU combos).
Dosbox-X , another fork of dosbox can connect to the "Real" OPL3 aka YMF262 chip through USB, and a nice GUI for almost every option you need to adjust, on the fly.
1 thing most of these videos leave out: Back in the day every second household had a midi capable keyboard or synth somewhere and you could connect that to your PC as a Wavetable Midi Module in addition to your Soundblaster. You could even use the line in of your soundcard if you didn't have a small stage mixer or something similar. The game music produced by those was as different as the keyboards where.
I love skip from pc speaker directly to roland ;D but it also shows how great pc speaker version was so it is still both recognizable and actually good in it's own right
One thing I love about emulation is how easy it is to mix CD/sound blaster/midi audio together. On real hardware it is a pain, and I haven't found a solution that doesn't degrade the audio quality by a lot. Not true with emulation! It's all digital baby, and you get individual volume settings for all inputs. Dosbox staging is great! Just about everything you would ever want for audio options there. One other thing to note - there are imitation sound canvas fonts out there that you can use with bog standard windows midi and it sounds quite good. You miss out on some of the special mixing available in sound canvas supported games, but the tone and instruments remain pretty balanced and it's way easier to get setup than tracking down a license for the VA plugin.
What I have is an external mixer and I routed the CD audio to a rear bracket at the back of the case. It works quite well, but even more cables to deal with...
Good series! I would definitely prefer a real retro PC and especially a real CRT, but I feel it's too expensive for what it is and I also have no space for it. Which CRT shader are you using here? I prefer the look of CRT Royale for the accuracy of the different masks but it also changes the color too much and crushes blacks, which is a bigger con than the pro's for me unfortunately. What you have here seems simple but effective.
8:58 I had experiments with using two different branded soundcards with FM chip and feed the sounds into a mixer. I think this was an IRQ conflict bug or feature? since dos didn't care , but this whas not popular with Windows. I can't say for sure i exploited a IRQ conflict bug, because this was many many years ago. But you may test it out by inserting two odd soundcards and configure the resources to the same.
I do not miss the weird ring-modulated fm sounds of the adlib/opl-fm/awe type of cards. GUS was the peak for regular people that couldn't affor an MT32 plus something with a DAC.
Thanks for the detailed comparison of sound options for retro DOS games. BTW, autofocus between 20:40 - 20:55 seemed to be very unstable; check if your autofucus locks on your face (eyes in particular).
It's quite nice what you can do with soft synths nowadays. I had the Roland SC-88 Softsynth (a bit hacked) for many years. And honestly (I do have an Original Roland SC-88, which was the 2'nd generation with like 4 times at least the sounds as the original SC-55, and there is absolutely no comparison between the hardware and the software. The software sound like the hardware, but like you had put the original samples in a box with a 12 bit DAC. The sound is grainy even you set the plugin at highest quality compared to the hardware and the different modes especially the 88 mode with 32 Midi channels and double the PCM sounds do not at all compare to the SC-88 hardware synth. the basic SC 55 sounds is pretty decent tho. The software wasn't any way near worth what Roland charged for it, but the hardware SC-88 was still more expensive. It's quite interesting cause many Softsynths that emulates eg the classic DX-7 Synth has the oposite effect cause of not taking into account the fact that the Hardware DX-7 had a very early midi implementation which ment they keyboard could only trigger from like 1-100 note on volumes instead of 127. Add to that the first version of the DX-7 used a 12bit DAC, so the software emulations often forget to adjust for this behavior and hence sound too clean and if you use a modern keyboard or a sequencer you have a much more dynamic range than when actually playing the DX-7 keyboard. If I had to choose between the different synth modes in DosBox I would propably go with the Gravis Sound or for those games that support dual Wave/Midi selction, one of the GM modes you like best, and SB16 wave. I do like the AWE 64 mode for its ability to put effects on the Adlib sounds. There still is something about those classic opl 2 and 3 sounds. I remember having both several Roland outboard sound boxes along with the first (Biig) AWE-32 card with fully expanded memory, iirc 8Mb ? Used to have a monster 8Mb GM sf2 sound bank which sounded quite good compared to the onboard one, think it was 512kb. If you like quality GM sounds, one of the outboard Roland solutions is an absolutely must. Roland actually made a card called RAP-10 that was a 1mb GM midi card with 16bit Wave sound like an SB16 competitor but very few games actually came configured to use it. I remember spending hours trying to hack the miles configs to add support for it. It was doable but it required the game to come with dual card supporting Sound setup for miles driver that had a config file with hex values for the settings you could edit 🙂
Are you going to give us a link to buy an mt-32?😉 By the way those Orico drives and most others use any surplus dvd drive they had a supply of. Even if they are surplus from years back. They use any 12.7mm slim laptop drive with a sata connector after all.
The external MIDI players are nice but they make the games sound weird, the sound quality is kinda disconnected from the visuals. I grew up with Sound Blaster, so the Adlib sound fits DOS games much better imo.
thanks for new video! I love how you compares all the sound & music options for DOS games. although I have real MT-32 and SC-55mk II and several retro PC for DOS & windows 98, I DO use dosbox emulation/ PCem emulation for DOS games because it is so convenient. I don't have ambition to run every single DOS games for perfect condition. I play old DOS game for my own nostalgic reason - childhood memories. so it doesn't matter which format I use. I appreciate that DOSbox emulates some of fancier sound card like Adlib gold or Gravis ultrasound(I tried to buy it is rare now). It is very easy to run DosBox for Tandy sound or parallel port sound card to bring back my memory without spending too much money. for me I play old DOS games maybe 3 times a month ?! so it is practical to play through DosBox rather than setting up real retro PC, which I already have but I become super lazy LOL
I will say that through a really good sound system, that the real thing has a certain lush character to it that Munt or Nuked just don't have. And this is mostly down to the analog stages being different of course. And only partly down to the actual emulation itself. The emulation options are pretty dang good though. And especially though a decent quality DAC are more than good enough. It really makes it not worth seeking out the vintage roland or Gravis hardware. Especially when you can export extended midi to a modern computer from a vintage one, and emulate what ever you want while still using a real 386. I would say this has really come to its own only in the last year or so with things like 86box and PCEm becoming more popular. Its wonderful to hear.
Hey Phil on that Yamaha emulator, could you please make a how to do a setup video, because it would be a lot fun going back and forth with munt 32!!!!!
One game to always mention whenever the topic of FM synthesis comes up: Tyrian sounds amazing on OPL2, but pretty lacklustre on anything General MIDI. Also, sounds like the Sound Blaster Pro 1 should be a target for hobbyist cloning. The original Sound Blaster got cloned with the Snark Barker, after all.
Fun fact: Dune uses the HERAD (HERbulot ADlib) sound system created by Remi Herbulot, and the soundtrack was written by Stephane Picq. These two were absolute technical masters of FM synthesis. HERAD is the only sound engine which implements the full feature set of the OPL2 chip, there is functionality which HERAD exposes that just isn't possible anywhere else. The games KGB and MegaRace also use HERAD. The only other person who I think even approaches this greatness is Bobby Prince who wrote the Doom soundtrack, he really knew his way around the Roland SC-55 and Yamaha OPL, being one of the very few PC music composers who bothered to vary the instruments instead of using the pre-made instrument set.
Thanks for the info! I remember reading about KGB before. It is a game I actually pleyed back in the day, but that's all I remember.
The presets were horrible. I don't miss that sound at all.
@@philscomputerlab All the French games from Amiga and early DOS era are masterpieces.
I wonder if Dune2 also used that, the music sounded particularly good in that game using Adlib FM synth
@@boardernut Dune 2 was produced in the US by completely different team. Frank Klepacki did the soundtrack.
I'd definitely be interested in a comparison between DOSBox Staging vs. DOSBox-X vs. original DOSBox.
Yup, a video highlighting the differences between DOSBox forks or what makes them unique would be great.
i like How DOSBox-X adding xBRz Bilinear Render , it looks amazing !
A review of various dosbox wrappers, including those with game cataloging features, would be great as well
That was a great comprehensive overview of the main audio enhancements we've introduced to DOSBox Staging lately! Congrats again, and I'm glad to see you enjoy using "our product" 😎🎧 I particularly liked that you mentioned the mighty Roland D-50, and I've finally learned what the number 32 in the name of the Roland CM-32L represents!
I got a good chuckle out of watching the Elite Plus example; not only do we get SOUND in space, now there's REVERB too! 🤯
I 100% agree on the need for the ability to easily adjust the mixer levels while playing a game; it's one of my long-standing pain-points. Well, I guess it's not much of a secret anymore that OSD (On-Screen Display) and On-Screen Notification support is coming to DOSBox Staging in the foreseeable future (think of the user interface of a TV, a modern console, or one of the more polished console emulators). That will include many exciting things, such as a vastly improved keymapper and (drumroll! 🥁) a brand new mixer! Yikes! Stay tuned! 😎🤘
Excited for what's coming 🙂
I've been following your videos for many years and this is the first time I've seen you in person. (or at least its image). you are a legend of retro computing. Greetings from Brazil
Wow, thank you!
Great to see you on camera Phil
11:30 ... damn, just awesome. What a great combination of the well known tune with the C64 "sound".
I'm very grateful for dosbox staging, it's so much better ! Especially love the Adlib Gold with Surround Module support. It sounds so good, so rich !
9 comments and no response? Lemme fix that.
Great showcase Phil! I love my old hardware, but I also love where we are at with emulation. The work of all these devs is how the DOS era will be preserved forever.
That Mach 3 intro instantly took me back to Saturday afternoons on the Tandy HX1000.. nostalgic hit lol
Discovered this channel and your videos about DosBox (which I've used in the past) and your ultimate 386 gaming PC.. Great! So much fun to watch. Gives me a warm and nostalgic feeling inside.. ; ) When I was young, 486 was my main childhood computer. Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Commander Keen, etc.. We only had PC Speaker sound, but I loved it. But was always a bit jealous when I came over at friends with glorious Sound Blaster and speakers. Makes it sound extra nostalgic and mysterious now.
Yea that's how it was back then. A friend bought a sound card? All friend check it out. Wow. Amazing. All friends also buy a sound card 😅
I had the Tandy 1000EX, and at the time had no idea most IBM compatible computers sounded so bad. When Sim Earth came out and required a hard drive, a family friend helped us build a clone to get us on the standard parts path. For a few months games sounded worse, but when the Sound Blaster came out we ordered one.
I got to the end of the vid and was like "where's the Dosbox sounds?" Then realised that it was Dosbox all the way though and not the cards he was holding up, damn those sounds are accurate.
Great video Phil! I would say this is the best way to experience the old software we still love without the issues and cost of having original hardware. As much as I love my old equipment it is such a lovely experience having the games and music applications (trackers) load exceptionally fast and work and sound great. I also liked the comment regarding the lifetime key with the Roland VA SoundCanvas VST "How long will that lifetime key last", this is exactly what I said to them as it needs to keep reauthorizing every 30 days, if they turn the server off I am left with nothing...
With regards to the sound, the DOSBOX Staging team are going to keep upgrading the sound so that if you select a SB1.0 or SB16 etc it will sound as close as possible to that card as possible (filter/frequency curve), something to look forward to but it already sounds more or less perfect.
You are committed to the community as far as you can go, thank you!
Install on Mint doesn't work but I'll give it a go this weekend. It may have solved my dosbox issues.
Just disovered your 2 part video on Dosbox, loved it, subscribed !
Its awesome how passionate you are about audio. As always, great to see a vid of yours pop up on the feed 🎉
G'day Phil,
Ah the memories of playing Lemmings, especially when you get stuck & frustrated with a level so just let out all 100 & turn them into exploders to watch them go off like Popcorn 😂
😅
There is a free and legal (but not open source) alternative to the Roland Sound Canvas VA software. Cakewalk is free and includes a MIDI synth called TTS-1 which just so happens to have licensed the real Sound Canvas instrument set from Roland, it sounds identical. Expect to spend 30-60 mins getting it up and running though. I installed it a few years ago thanks to a RUclips video I saw, I tested it with DosBox and PrBoom-plus and it worked great. NB: This synth and parts of Cakewalk are really old, my retro gaming PC runs Windows 7 x64 so YMMV. If you have any problems consider running it in a virtual machine.
No matter how many times I hear the Roland MT-32 I'll never get over how incredible games sound with it.
It's my dream dos hardware piece, but I would need to win the lottery to be able to afford one.
Dosbox staging has made some enormous improvements, massive kudos should go to the team working on it cause these new features are amazing.
19:17 Oh my god... that hit me hard! Privateer was one of the greatest games of my youth. Thank you for the video. I might look this up and revisit some old games :-)
Like many other youngsters I had no access to MT-32 or SC-55 in the early 90s and I had to settle for SoundBlaster clone. But in the early 2000 all those Roland MIDI modules and Gravis Ultrasound cards were dirt cheap and I finally got several of them when DOS gaming was not hip anymore. Everybody was dumping ISA sound cards in favor of Windows 98/XP compatible PCI sound cards and EAX or A3D surround. Now I have LAPC-I, MT-32, SC-55, GUS Extreme and loads of different SoundBlasters and their clone cards.
I love my old stuff but I'm still super happy that everyone else can hear those glorious MIDI and FM sounds in emulation as they sounded back in the good ole days. No need to spend fortunes in old hardware!
I remember those times! Hardware cheap as chips.. How things have changed...
@@philscomputerlab Yup. There is a curve for all hardware where it is first brand new, popular and expensive, then dated, unpopular and dirt cheap and finally expensive again because of rarity and nostalgia. Logically we should always buy in the low curve but irony is that there is a reason it's dirt cheap: nobody really wants it right then and there. Very few people usually notice or bother to hoard that stuff at the right moment. I guess "after 10-20 years I'll probably value it more!" is too much of a stretch for us. Especially when we were in our 20s and were blinded by rapid technological advancement.
I emulate my DOS games and I have to say the future is looking bright. Now, I wish there was some technology that perfectly emulated the CRT experience.
the closest I've been getting to obtaining that extra-crisp bright vivid colorful sharp definition is to use ReShade (in the games that support it) For example Doom... there should be a way of running ReShade with dosbox, never tested it... try with different dosbox renderers (ddraw, opengl, direct3d)
Crt royale shader on a plasma or oled is pretty close
I was blown away by the voice sample of Mach3 when I first played it on my AT-clone (IPC) with only a PC speaker. It was a business only setup, but since my father worked as a city planner, he required high-resolution graphics with as much colours as possible, so while my sound experience was quite poor, the graphics were astounding for a late 80's PC-compatible :-D. Now I own both the Roland MT-32 and the Sound Canvas 55 to have a great MIDI experience whenever I feel the urge to fire up some classics that support it. Just hold while I insert another buckazoid...
Awesome!
With some clever programming and 100% deticated cpu usage, you could actually play sampled digital audio on your 8088/80286 PC speaker. There are some other games that also used this technique. Battle Chess and some golf game from that time is what I can remember.
Descent on the Yamaha sound FANTASTIC, I hope someone uploads the entire soundtrack with that... :)
Loving your retro content lately, Phil! 🍻
Phill and LGR, very good youtuber's...
Fortunately, emulations are getting better every year. I'm a big fan of the real thing myself, but I certainly can't get the flexibility that emulation gives me when using my old hardware. Thanks for the many years of interesting content.
That Doom Arachno soundfont did it for me. I'm digging this!!!
thanks for all your hard work this is amazing i can't wait for tinkering and experiment with many of my childhood games especially Descent i have some old hardware but this sure helps to preserve so many memories and the spirit of the time
Thanks, Phil. This video has taught me two things: One, DOSBox Staging is excellent; And, two, I need a real MT-32.
Remember to check what version has the best compatibility with the games you'd like to play. The old version and the later version have subtle differences in sound. The old version also lacks a headphone jack, so if that's important for you go for the newer model. If you find a CM-500, go for that one instead, but it has been rare as hen's teeth these days and stupidly expensive, so...
@@LarixusSnydes CM-500 is nice in theory since it has GM built in, but you'll need to mod the hardware a bit if you want to fix the MT-32 vibrato speed.
@@ozzyp97 Good to know, but this module is getting extremely rare with prices to match, so I don't see myself performing the vibrato mod on them anytime soon😉
Thanks for another great vid Phil and promoting DosBox as an option in case you don't have the retro HW. Anyway like you said no emulator can replace the joy of dealing with your own physical, noisy AT or ATX retro machine :) For me the way of bringing my preferred Gravis MIDI sound flavour into the Pentium IV Win98 machine (=no ISA slot) was instaling Gravis PAT compiled as 32 MB sound font for SB Live 5.1. Now I have both the Reverb from SB and the sounding of Gravis which is awesome :)
Descent on the Sound Canvas sounded amazing. I went back recently and played through Descent and it really holds up well.
How long does a Descent playthrough take roughly?
@@armorgeddon Looks like 14-20 hours. I'm going by a website that tracks that sort of thing since I'm really bad at estimating it myself.
@@TheRonHockman Thanks for the answer. I didn't expect those websites to also track such old games. I also didn't expect 14 to 20 hours for Descent, wow.
Although not common, the Tandy 1000 was sold in Europe. Tandy had stores in various countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium.
Amazing I had no idea! Curious if they sold in Austria or Germany because I cannot remember seeing anything in the magazines...
Huge Tandy fan and I’d love to learn more about EU market sales. Any links?
My dad derisively referred to Tandy as the RadioShack computer.
Great content Phil. When it comes to PC retro gaming you are truly the king!
Wow, thanks!
I'm definitely going to have to try this. One of the things mainline DOSBox can't handle is how Wizardry 6 and 7 drive the OPL chip, resulting in very glitchy sound. I followed your guide to set up my main PC as a virtual midi synth with the Roland CM-64, SC-55, Yamaha XG, and 2 different sound fonts. Arachno is one of them. I forget the name of the other, but it's huge! But that doesn't necessarily mean better. I do have a physical CM-64, but it's in storage. Don't really have the space to set up a stack of 3 midi modules and switches. Just like I don't really have the space for multiple machines. I've been very impressed with the quality of emulation these days, having followed it since the mid 90s. Now, if only a flavor of DOSBox would add EMU8000 support to fully emulate an AWE32/64, I would be very happy. As it is, I can use PCem or 86Box for that.
The biggest soundfont that i found is Musyng Kite and it really is great sounding one
@@Ambiphonic the one I was talking about is the Crisis General Midi 3.01. It’s over a GB in size.
@@christopherbaar4498 Thx i'll check it out.
I deleted my previous comment that the sound problems in Wizardry 6 persist even with Nuked OPL. My copy of the game was from GOG, which configures it for PC speaker and does not include the installer needed to change the settings. Fortunately, I also have the Ultimate Wizardry Archives CD, which does have the installer. Once I changed the settings, it sounded perfect!
I loved hearing all those midi devices and what devs did with with them back in the day. Great video!
Great video with the latest options, love how it's getting REALLY close to the original experience, minus the signal noise and driver setup hassle.
I have a lot of the original hardware (AWE 64 Gold, MT32, SC155), and I am really interested how close it actually is. I might do some comparisons myself to see if I can hear the difference, or measure it in any way.
Do a direct recording for a blind test. And go even further and upload them so that other people can hear the difference as well.
Another great video! Love the large variety and comparisons.
Thanks so much!
Yeah, I've been trying to get my hands on a Sound Blaster Pro 1, and it's actually harder to find than a SB 2.0 (non-pro). I've literally got handful of the latter that I've picked up over the years whenever I've seen them going for a reasonable price, but I've only seen a few SB Pro 1 cards and they've all been asking or selling for crazy prices. I've seen more of the original SB 1.0 cards go up than SB Pro 1 cards.
That Adlib gold card sounds awesome in Dune, I loved that game growing up and it's pretty awesome to hear it in stereo!
Ultima VI sounds pretty awesome coming out of a SID too.
I'm glad I spent the money to buy a bunch of gear (including among others a MT-32 and SC-55 MkII, both of which I never had growing up). but honestly it seems so much easier to just use DOSBox Staging. If I were getting into retro computing today, I wouldn't bother with real hardware, I'd just use this instead. And even $69 (presumably yankee bucks?) for a SC lifetime key is pretty great compared to what they're selling for these days.
Anyway, it was fun to see all the different options for sound in retro games. I'm more into a big electronics phase at the moment, and I don't really have room for both hobbies, so it's great to see there's some great options for getting a real retro sound out of a modern emulator (especially since I'm running a mac as my daily driver these days).
Very cool stuff. 🙂
My first add in sound card, from 1992-1995, was a Pro Audio Spectrum by Media Vision. That's the card I played most of the games in this video on. It emulated Sound Blaster but also had its own mode that a small number of games supported.
Also used one of those! It was great. Can you remember any games that had actual PAS16 support?
Also used one of those! It was great. Can you remember any games that had actual PAS16 support?
I played soo much of Bodukan when I was young. I had a IBM computer with a internal speaker. I would never imagine that the game had such sound using the Roland 😊
Great video, time for an Ultrasound special..😉👍
That game blaster really has grown on me throughout the years
Nice video Phil. Sound is the most important thing in a DOS gaming PC. Nothing more annoying than playing Lemmings on a bad FM implementation
This is really cool. I do just like seeing my MT-32 or MU-1000 do their thing while they play music back or the silly message that some games put on the MT-32's screen. If I didn't already have the MT-32, I'd gladly emulate it. I just lucked out and bought one years ago because I'd always wanted one as a kid. It was before the prices really went nuts-- I'd never spend what most people are asking for them now. Same is true for my SCB-55, sw1000xg, SW60xg, DB50xg, AWE32... I just kind of liked to try different MIDI dodads when they were fading from popularity and just scooped them up (a couple of them I bought new, though). So I'm kind of lucky in that I can play games with different modules just to hear what they sound like, but Staging sounds amazing! I mean, I might have to finally semi-retire my real DOS machine and give it a shot. Thanks for the video!
Yeah, that is one downside of wmulation, or even the wavetable upgrades. Though there is the nice convenience of not having to track all the cables needed for the MT-32. I have one of those and an SC-88 pro, but nice to just use the Orpheus II and X2GS set up I got recently!
@@slaapliedje Funny you should bump this. I was bored the other day and finally gave Stages and Munt a go. Damn. Munt is *really* good. I have an early (no headphone jack) MT-32, and it is pretty nice to play some demanding tracks without clipping, dropped instruments, but still true-to-original instrument sounds. It even has an emulated display that I keep open on another screen. Years ago, I didn't think the MT-32 would ever be emulated (early on because of complexity and then because of a lack of interest), but here we are.
I can also just route MIDI to my USB-connected MU-1000 in Win10. My DOS machine became even more niche. I'm thinking about an SC-8850 now, though :D
Great video, Phil. I am also from the same era like you with my 386dx40, but i never had the full overview of all that multiple sound options. I would also go with a soundblaster 16 and a soundcanvas for midi, which i can also use with my Atari St.
Yea SB 16 and Sound Canvas is a great combo.
Great stuff! I'm personally still using MUNT and Coolsoft Virtual Synth along with DOSbox staging but I'm going to try the dosbox staging emulation
Can this DOSbox version record midi music (original dosbox can only record OPL)
It can record the audio ouput into a WAV file, the MIDI output into a MID file, and the raw data sent to the OPL chip you can play back with special OPL music players.
@@johnnovak1979 Too bad. I wish there was ability to record audio and midi music into one video file when recording gameplay
@@GamePlayShare There's nothing preventing you from enabling audio, midi, video and OPL recording all at the same time :)
In my opinion, audio is definitively better through emulation. Original sound cards are buggy and noisy, and the emulated version is just the same thing, but better. There are extremely strong arguments in favor of original hardware regarding video output (CRT motion sensation, completely different looks, input lag) but I don't think the same can be applied to sound. That being said, there is a market for vinyl enthusiasts, so if there are people who prefer to hear their music with scratches and noise, perhaps the same thing exists in retro gaming.
HI Phil, I have been watching your videos for 8 years and you look exactly as you sound !
Wow, thanks
The attention to detail in sound emulation in dosbox-staging is next level. Now, when it comes to GM, I use the fatboy soundfont. It sounds great for pretty anything I've used it for.
Nice, I will try that soundfont next time I have an opportunity!
Man, I remember when I was overjoyed to go from PC Speaker to a sound blaster...how things have changed since those days.
Its "ok" but nothing to compere it when u go from PC speaker to a Gravis Ultrasound :)
I was awestruck when I first heard Roland MT-32 music. I even remember it to this day. I came to a computer shop where I previously bought my first PC. I wanted to replace my first tiny computer loudspeakers for my Sound Blaster compatible sound card (*It was Aztech PRO 16 really) for something a little bit better and the guys there were testing MT-32 with some Sierra and Lucas Arts games they had. It was also the first time they had it in their shop, so they were also quite excited and gathered around it. I remember I stayed there for like an hour listening to all the tunes, some of which I had heard on my Aztech before and I was like: "Dudes, forget the loudspeakers I came for, I want this awesome magical music box you have here!!!" And they were like, ha-ha, dude, sure, hope you brought a bunch of green paper with you, cause it ain't cheap, chief". And then they told me the price. lol
I have an SC-155 which I am learning to use at the moment, whether for pc dos games(connected to soundblaster Audigy card & rack), as with my other instruments such as the Rm1x, the CS10 keyboard, and the Korg Volca bass all recorded on AW16G managing analog multitrack and midi. I have been at the start for a few months, but I have already been able to take advantage of the SC-155's multitrack allowing existing music to create variations, really cool.
I remember it back in that days. Nobody of us know how MT-32 actually sounds like, we have been only speculating, so therefore it was such as huge surprise when I have got one later on.
It couldn't be emulated via soundfonts (only it's basic presets), as in reality it was virtual analogue synth + PCM with "endless" programmability.
SB AWE 32/64 had literally awful basic 1MB ROM GM bank, there was a huge potential in dos games to use it's standard 512KB RAM for custom patches-samples, but I don't remember any single games to utilize it (maybe FFVII).
Gravis Ultrasound I remember as super amazing for trackers (MOD, S3M, etc..), it sounds quite warm and natural, however for MIDI it was useless a it didn't had Reverb/ Chorus effect processor.
Yamaha XG was phenomenal standard with amazing effects and filters, I always wanted SW1000XG, after I heard SW50XG and XG MIDI I was totally sold on it, later on I manage to get MU100R, anyway it have also GM/GS emulation mode and also "MT-32" preset bank emulation.
Anyway best fun is if you try DOS games (GM/GS MIDI) with profi class synth modules like Yamaha Motif-RACK or Roland Fantom XR, it doesn't matter how big soundfont your will upload into DOSBOX these two will blow it out of water.
GODS uses those 33 extra effects on channel 10.
If you already have physical midi modules you can connect them to dosbox with cheep usb to midi cable, it's pretty great.
Yes you are right!
You pretty much nailed it. The hardware is really expensive and if you lucky to have the MT32 ROM's, you all set. As a kid I remember that I was "over the moon" when the first AWE cards supported MT32 emulation. It worked for a bit and would then just lock-up horribly but I missioned through that. The Ensoniq SoundScape to me was also a beautiful card (GM Support) but the Sound Blaster support just was not there. My Dosbox emulation is here right next to my DCS world so I'm happier then a pig-in-poo.
back when the PC speaker was king, this top level Midi audio, was a valuable, but it was top level musicians/audio, kit, audio recording setup stuff, not the sort kit you would of had laying around next even a game PC back then if there was such a thing, PC where expected to do a lot more than just play games,
@@dh2032 Yup. And as a kid, you see the options in the game setup, you do research on what it is and find out how much it costs, your heart just sank into your shoes. I only heard the MT32 for the first time in 1993 and I was blown away.
I'm wondering what Soundfont the Yamaha PSR-450 used, love how some things sound on it but kind of lazy to always have it standing around somewhere and would love to reproduce and test things out in an emulator first.
I have a PSR530 here and it sounds eerily similar to the 4MB kit S-YXG50. I would say the S-YXG interpretation is a little rougher and crunchier in reverb and chorus, seems to me like, but it's the same samples. I think given you have access to 480 XG patches on the 450, just like on the 530, it's a possibility that you have the same ROM, you should check whether it sounds like that, or more similar to newer ones like S-YXG2006LE. Thing with 2006 though is that it's incomplete and a little broken, so if your sounds don't match the S-YXG50, you basically have no decent emulator to use.
I still have my issues with you personally though. You should apologise.
Oh man the S-YXG50 sounds lovely.
Thank you for the analysis.
My only comment is how beautiful that background is, Another World is a masterpiece.
P.S. on eBay news, recently surfaced a sealed/boxed GF4Ti 4600, the bid closed on $1200.
(pretty much nonexistent item)
Great video as always, Phil! Your coverage on these sorts of things always goes above and beyond! Since your first video I've been tinkering with DosBox Staging, and I am incredibly impressed especially with a 4K monitor and the fakelottes.tweaked shader. For Sound Canvas VA and the Yamaha S-YXG50 VST's, what host program do you use? Still SAVIHost or did you find something else?
Hi, I'm not Phil, but I use SAVIHost and am quite happy with it. It has both 32 and 64 bit versions so you can host either 32 or 64-bit VST plugins, which is very nice. Its record feature can come in handy too.
Yes that's still the method I'm using 🙂
@@NilsByte In the video, I just played a MIDI file with MIDI player as this is my main computer and didn't want to muck around too much 🙂
Thanks for sharing this with us Phil.
It comes to my mind, what if you make a game recomendation video? As in, for those of us who want to get into retro gaming (particularly DOS and Win98, early 2000s perhaps), what games would you recommend?
Also, you have a lot of videos putting together PCs, but do you think it's possible that in the future you make a dummy guide to retro gaming? The dos and dont's, tips, useful resources, that could make for a neat video. Thanks for the great work!
Good ideas :) I haven't tried a games focussed video yet!
God damn, I forgot Descent hade pretty cool music!
Sooner than later I'm going to have to learn to use Dosbox. Having to say goodbye to original hardware as it fails from age is hard and using the old stuff daily it's just a matter of time. I'm going to definitely get into this this week while on holliday.
Worth it!
Great video! Someday can you also do some tests with dosbox-x? I never know the difference in terms of sound emulation capabilities between all the dosbox flavors.
DOSBox Staging has the best audio features of all DOSBox variants currently.
The newest version of DOSBox is huge step forward.
Dude, you totally sound like the Goldmember (from Austin Powers In Goldmember [2002]), which is really cool! Are you dutch? Very nice video!
Austria 😅
I have a DOS/Win98 pc but I find I'm not using it much. I've been using dosbox and recently dosbox-x (much easier to use). Also stumbled onto exodos. So convenient.
From memory it all sound accurate to my ears, and I have been around since the PC Speaker/ZX Spectrum/Amiga 2000 days. Although indeed with the small touches it sounds better than they did original.
First soundcard was a SB Pro 2 followed by a SB AWE64, than a Live! and X-Fi was the last one. To be honest, Creative has been getting a bigger and bigger pain in the behind driver wise to the point that I stopped bothering buying a soundcard altogether.
Phil's making my main PC pump out the retro beatz!
Nice video, I've known DosBox Staging for a while but haven't tried it yet. I play a lot of retro games, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the video.
Somewhere in my closet I know I have an SB AWE 64 Gold. That thing was soooo good for its time. Moved from it to an XFI card from what I remember (which I also still have somewhere).
Gotta switch to DOSbox staging after these last two videos. This is everything I've been waiting for.
Excellent video comparison!!!
Many of the sound cards I had only heard at that time, because they were too expensive to buy (just for gaming).
Recently I watched a whole Space Quest III longplay just to enjoy how it sounds on real Roland 32. It seems with this new DOSBox Staging I could experience it for myself - the way it was meant to be.
It's great indeed! I still prefer my eMac and a real MT32 but wonderful application. You can mix MT-32 for music and Soundblaster for FX in some games. Dosbox Staging supports HiDpi on Macs by the way, 1280x720 HiDpi looks great with the right scanlines shader."
Great CRT filter. Looks very nice, does DOSBox Staging also includes it? I myself play DOS games on a real CRT display, but I really dig this filter (if something happens to my CRT, I can imagine myself playing with such a filter w/o much struggle)
It has the filter stored in C:\Program Files\DOSBox Staging
esources\glshaders and for me, I had to copy them into \AppData\Local\DOSBox\glshaders. You can also download them from github.com/tyrells/dosbox-svn-shaders
@@philscomputerlab Can I ask you what shader you used for this video? And what output resolution? Are they better in 4k than in 1440p?
@@kosmosyche I ran DOSBox on a Mini PC connected to a 4K capture device recording 4K30. Shader was fakelottes.tweaked I believe...
@@philscomputerlab Thanks. I'm going to try it.
@@philscomputerlabYou shouldn't need to copy shaders, DOSBox looks for the bundled ones in the resources folder by default. Also, downloading them from Tyrell's repo is not recommended, as we've made several improvements to them, but Tyrell is no longer maintaining that repo therefore did not update his originals with our improvements. Just use our bundled ones for best result (e.g. his originals break on some OS and GPU combos).
Dosbox-X , another fork of dosbox can connect to the "Real" OPL3 aka YMF262 chip through USB, and a nice GUI for almost every option you need to adjust, on the fly.
The music of Epic Pinball with GUS was magic.
That audio selection for Budokan brings back some memories ^_^
Oh my….. I wrote that comment before you showed the Budokan Roland demo….. holy crapzoids! That’s friggin amazing.
Would be nice to see the Gravis Ultrasound review in your channel... any way, great video
1 thing most of these videos leave out: Back in the day every second household had a midi capable keyboard or synth somewhere and you could connect that to your PC as a Wavetable Midi Module in addition to your Soundblaster. You could even use the line in of your soundcard if you didn't have a small stage mixer or something similar. The game music produced by those was as different as the keyboards where.
I love skip from pc speaker directly to roland ;D but it also shows how great pc speaker version was so it is still both recognizable and actually good in it's own right
DOS game music so totally sick, Phil. Awesome video! 😎😎😎
One thing I love about emulation is how easy it is to mix CD/sound blaster/midi audio together. On real hardware it is a pain, and I haven't found a solution that doesn't degrade the audio quality by a lot. Not true with emulation! It's all digital baby, and you get individual volume settings for all inputs. Dosbox staging is great! Just about everything you would ever want for audio options there.
One other thing to note - there are imitation sound canvas fonts out there that you can use with bog standard windows midi and it sounds quite good. You miss out on some of the special mixing available in sound canvas supported games, but the tone and instruments remain pretty balanced and it's way easier to get setup than tracking down a license for the VA plugin.
What I have is an external mixer and I routed the CD audio to a rear bracket at the back of the case. It works quite well, but even more cables to deal with...
Good series! I would definitely prefer a real retro PC and especially a real CRT, but I feel it's too expensive for what it is and I also have no space for it. Which CRT shader are you using here? I prefer the look of CRT Royale for the accuracy of the different masks but it also changes the color too much and crushes blacks, which is a bigger con than the pro's for me unfortunately. What you have here seems simple but effective.
I believe it was fakelottes.tweaked!
crt/aperture is another good one to try.
8:58 I had experiments with using two different branded soundcards with FM chip and feed the sounds into a mixer.
I think this was an IRQ conflict bug or feature? since dos didn't care , but this whas not popular with Windows.
I can't say for sure i exploited a IRQ conflict bug, because this was many many years ago.
But you may test it out by inserting two odd soundcards and configure the resources to the same.
I do not miss the weird ring-modulated fm sounds of the adlib/opl-fm/awe type of cards. GUS was the peak for regular people that couldn't affor an MT32 plus something with a DAC.
The Yamaha MU2000EX with the PLG 150 DR card is my goto for my MIDI gaming. However there are so many great options.
Yes so many options. You can easily get carried away just trying out different Midi options...
@@philscomputerlab Yes, carried away indeed. * Looks at 17 different external MIDI modules * XD
I'm a fan of the MU80, which sounds just like any MU series module in GS mode, doesn't it? At least that's my understanding 😂
@@Vanessaira-RetroI only have 5, plus the m32pi 😂
Thanks for the detailed comparison of sound options for retro DOS games. BTW, autofocus between 20:40 - 20:55 seemed to be very unstable; check if your autofucus locks on your face (eyes in particular).
Apparently this camera, Lumix G7, has really poor autofocus. I will try a different AF mode next time and see if it makes a difference.
It's quite nice what you can do with soft synths nowadays. I had the Roland SC-88 Softsynth (a bit hacked) for many years. And honestly (I do have an Original Roland SC-88, which was the 2'nd generation with like 4 times at least the sounds as the original SC-55, and there is absolutely no comparison between the hardware and the software. The software sound like the hardware, but like you had put the original samples in a box with a 12 bit DAC. The sound is grainy even you set the plugin at highest quality compared to the hardware and the different modes especially the 88 mode with 32 Midi channels and double the PCM sounds do not at all compare to the SC-88 hardware synth. the basic SC 55 sounds is pretty decent tho. The software wasn't any way near worth what Roland charged for it, but the hardware SC-88 was still more expensive. It's quite interesting cause many Softsynths that emulates eg the classic DX-7 Synth has the oposite effect cause of not taking into account the fact that the Hardware DX-7 had a very early midi implementation which ment they keyboard could only trigger from like 1-100 note on volumes instead of 127. Add to that the first version of the DX-7 used a 12bit DAC, so the software emulations often forget to adjust for this behavior and hence sound too clean and if you use a modern keyboard or a sequencer you have a much more dynamic range than when actually playing the DX-7 keyboard.
If I had to choose between the different synth modes in DosBox I would propably go with the Gravis Sound or for those games that support dual Wave/Midi selction, one of the GM modes you like best, and SB16 wave. I do like the AWE 64 mode for its ability to put effects on the Adlib sounds. There still is something about those classic opl 2 and 3 sounds. I remember having both several Roland outboard sound boxes along with the first (Biig) AWE-32 card with fully expanded memory, iirc 8Mb ? Used to have a monster 8Mb GM sf2 sound bank which sounded quite good compared to the onboard one, think it was 512kb.
If you like quality GM sounds, one of the outboard Roland solutions is an absolutely must. Roland actually made a card called RAP-10 that was a 1mb GM midi card with 16bit Wave sound like an SB16 competitor but very few games actually came configured to use it. I remember spending hours trying to hack the miles configs to add support for it. It was doable but it required the game to come with dual card supporting Sound setup for miles driver that had a config file with hex values for the settings you could edit 🙂
Holy shit I really needed this video. Setting up a SC-88 Pro in my DJ rig. Thank you!
Are you going to give us a link to buy an mt-32?😉 By the way those Orico drives and most others use any surplus dvd drive they had a supply of. Even if they are surplus from years back. They use any 12.7mm slim laptop drive with a sata connector after all.
20:42 Fluidsynth? I recommend copying the sf2 soundfont out from QZDoom and adding just a tiny bit of reverb, man, that sounds pretty good! 😏
The external MIDI players are nice but they make the games sound weird, the sound quality is kinda disconnected from the visuals. I grew up with Sound Blaster, so the Adlib sound fits DOS games much better imo.
Thanks Phil!! Are your setup .confs available anywhere??? Yer the wizard and I’d love to see them.
thanks for new video! I love how you compares all the sound & music options for DOS games. although I have real MT-32 and SC-55mk II and several retro PC for DOS & windows 98, I DO use dosbox emulation/ PCem emulation for DOS games because it is so convenient. I don't have ambition to run every single DOS games for perfect condition. I play old DOS game for my own nostalgic reason - childhood memories. so it doesn't matter which format I use.
I appreciate that DOSbox emulates some of fancier sound card like Adlib gold or Gravis ultrasound(I tried to buy it is rare now). It is very easy to run DosBox for Tandy sound or parallel port sound card to bring back my memory without spending too much money.
for me I play old DOS games maybe 3 times a month ?! so it is practical to play through DosBox rather than setting up real retro PC, which I already have but I become super lazy LOL
I will say that through a really good sound system, that the real thing has a certain lush character to it that Munt or Nuked just don't have. And this is mostly down to the analog stages being different of course. And only partly down to the actual emulation itself. The emulation options are pretty dang good though. And especially though a decent quality DAC are more than good enough. It really makes it not worth seeking out the vintage roland or Gravis hardware. Especially when you can export extended midi to a modern computer from a vintage one, and emulate what ever you want while still using a real 386.
I would say this has really come to its own only in the last year or so with things like 86box and PCEm becoming more popular. Its wonderful to hear.
Hey Phil on that Yamaha emulator, could you please make a how to do a setup video, because it would be a lot fun going back and forth with munt 32!!!!!
One game to always mention whenever the topic of FM synthesis comes up: Tyrian sounds amazing on OPL2, but pretty lacklustre on anything General MIDI.
Also, sounds like the Sound Blaster Pro 1 should be a target for hobbyist cloning. The original Sound Blaster got cloned with the Snark Barker, after all.
Soumds like GOG could replace the default dosbox with this one in their game catalogue
So much effort was paid of - such amazing video ♥