Midi emulator

Is there any way to emulate the oldschool sounding midis? Like it was on an older computer?

You mean how it sounded like on a crappy soundcard without real MIDI support? Why for god's sake would you want THAT :P

I first played Doom on a crappy Packard bell 200 mhz and 56 ram. Can't I relive my glory days to the max? :P

ZDoom has built-in OPL synthesis, if that's what you're looking for.

use an emulator which can emulate adlib sound (VDMSound or Dosbox for example), run setup.exe and choose adlib. And voila! ugly midi sound.

ZDoom does have the OPL emulator. To get the pitch to sound right, you have to set the frequency to 49715 Hz in the console:

opl_frequency 49715

I wish there was a soundfont or something that emulated the old MIDI sound, because I think wave-table MIDI is just awful and makes the stuff sound stiff and unrealistic.

And old style midi did sound realistic? ROFL.

It didn't. But I did feel that it sounded better than wavetable, imo, which, I agree, sounds stiff and often weird.

I guess I'm too used to how it sounded when I first played Doom using Doom95. :P

My 5 cents to this is that crappy = good sometimes.
I remember my old Commodore 64 and those wonderfull games with crappy sound and music.
It just sounded good even though the music had 4 channels and the sound scarred your ears.

When I replay thos games using an emulator it just doesn't sound right.
I finally had to build a scart cable and hook up my old C64 to my TV to be able to play the games with "right" sound.

I may be a nerd that base my oppinion on nostalgic memories rather than fact.
But I do think that the older crappy unclean sound is better.
Because it's the original.

I have made a wad with all PC speaker sounds in just to relive those glory days.
The new DooMports doesn't support PC speaker anymore.

But MIDI wasn't designed to sound crappy. It was just that most gamer's hardware was too limited to make it sound good.

You got a point there.
But have in mind that the DooM midis were designed to sound good on those crappy midicards back then.
That's why they sound strange on our newer soundcards now.

Doom always sounded great on the GUS, which was a quite common sound card at the time. So i do not agree it was made for crappy sound cards.

as far as I remember, SoundFX 2000 has a pretty good SB16 Midi emulator... it sounds almost like a real SB16 music.

Anders said:

Doom always sounded great on the GUS, which was a quite common sound card at the time. So i do not agree it was made for crappy sound cards.

I agree with you.
I choose the word "crappy" so that my opponents here would know what I was talking about.
I do *not* think older soundcards are crappy just because ther is something better to buy.

Besides, a used SB16 card cost almost nothing.
So why bother with emulations and whatnot.
I have an older computer as a "DooM/Old games-computer".
It's a Celeron500 with 128ram and SB16 card and voodoo 3500 gfx card.
It plays DooM and all other older games I like to play.

Might I point out this wonderful Japanese-made MIDI player? It's not EXACTLY what they used to sound like (it actually emulates either a Nintendo Famicom or the MSX2's SCC chip), but it's better than wavetable.