System Shock (on 1.44MB floppies) is getting disk read errors on my Windows 95 laptop - by dickkickem
MidiV on 22/6/2018 at 08:22
My favourite themes are Executive and Elevator.
Even my father has Elevator theme as a ringtone for about ten years and he's strongly against changing it :D
icemann on 22/6/2018 at 13:54
Quote Posted by D'Arcy
The music was somehow different. Not different music tracks, just sounded different. Maybe it's because of the SB16 I had on my 486DX4.
That was fairly common in early 90s PC games. Often had vastly different sounding music from card to card. If you had a Gravis Ultrasound that resulted in some great sounding music in most games. Superior to sound blaster even.
NuclearSquirrel on 25/6/2018 at 00:53
Quote Posted by icemann
That was fairly common in early 90s PC games. Often had vastly different sounding music from card to card. If you had a Gravis Ultrasound that resulted in some great sounding music in most games. Superior to sound blaster even.
I'm going to go way out on a memory limb here...
Didn't that have to do with the bit level (8/16/32 bit) of the sound card bus...then you load a MIDI sound font (what I remember them called) based on that bit level (on your sound card) and available space in RAM...and you could get higher res midi sounds?
In theory you could get the floppy ver sounds on any card today that supports MIDI. Just have to use that same sound font (prob 8 bit to fit on the floppies).
You're downgrading it basically. Just go hunting on the floppy ver disks for that sound font. Should be there somewhere.
Hope that turns out helpful to anyone wanting to do a playthrough with the floppy music. I'm just having fun being a DOS nerd again for a second.
Viva la TTLG. :)
Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk
icemann on 27/6/2018 at 04:08
Answer to the above - I have no idea.
All I know is that in most games if I picked the Gravis as sound card for music (eg Lands of Lore) it resulted in far superior music.
Al_B on 27/6/2018 at 08:03
Quote Posted by NuclearSquirrel
In theory you could get the floppy ver sounds on any card today that supports MIDI. Just have to use that same sound font (prob 8 bit to fit on the floppies).
You're downgrading it basically. Just go hunting on the floppy ver disks for that sound font. Should be there somewhere.
Unfortunately it's not likely to be that easy. The music on old sound cards used a Yamaha (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YM3812) YM3812 which had the waveform built into the chip. The tones were modulated using (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_modulation_synthesis) FM synthesis which gave it a distinctive sound that would be difficult to reproduce using a MIDI soundfont - the principle is quite different.
terrannova on 27/6/2018 at 23:52
I prefer the Yamaha YMF262-M on the SoundBlaster Pro, 16, and AWE32 cards, the golden era of OPL3 mmmmmmm...
icemann on 1/7/2018 at 04:07
Might be do-able under dosbox.
Al_B on 1/7/2018 at 10:35
Yes, there is OPL (the Yamaha chips) emulation in dosbox and it's good enough for my ears.
D'Arcy on 8/7/2018 at 22:39
Well, I just installed the game from my floppies - and laughed when I found inside the box an extra floppy labelled 'bootdisk + memmaker'. Man, this thing was hard to run on my 486 :D
Anyway, the music does sound a lot different indeed. At least when I configure the game to use SoundBlaster, which was what I had on my old computer.
Vipersan on 23/7/2019 at 09:21
This thread is the reason I joined ttlg ..having searched the net for images to fix my own copy of System Shock (1994)
Without success sadly.
I have a boxed copy with 9 disks ...
I have managed to image (winimage .ima) disks 1 through 7 ...and disk 9
Sadly I have a circular scratch on disk 8 which makes it unreadable.
So I thought perhaps the thread starter dickkickem would be interested in joint effort to fix both his copy and mine.
From reading the post I get the impression he needs disk 1
Mine is readable..
I need disk 8 ..and I'm hoping his is ok.
Can we help each other ?
fingers crossed.
hope I didn't break any rules with this post..if so please excuse me ..I'm new here.
rgds
VS