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Mr.Clutchpants

A post which I am sure has been beaten to death

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Alright, this is a simple declaration of my understanding (or lack thereof) but I am stating this now, so I would appreciate it if you guys didn’t remind me ^_^

1) I have been playing doom for a long time. I started on my trusty 486 and I was never the same after. I bought doom95 when that came out and by then had a new computer, but I hated what they did to the music!
2) Using the minimal knowledge of computers I had at that time, I somehow managed to install doom (sans 95), and I still had the TRUE original music.

Now for the questions-

Is it the case that doom will never sound like it did on the 486 because of the sound drivers and better cards out now? Is there anyway I can fix this? *I would like to note that there were some previous threads on this, but none of them really answered the question* I also wouldn’t mind having the original files to listen to- but I have no idea how to extract/find/work with any of the music files in doom. If anyone can help me I would be greatly indebted!

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How the midi music sounds depends on how the sound card interprets the midi file, so it'll sound a little different on different cards (and sometimes downright abysmal).

As for downloading the music, check this out:

http://www.doomworld.com/classicdoom/info/music.php

What's provided there are midi files (the original music files) and mp2 files recorded with a Roland SCC1.

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The MP2's sound 'new', but can that be fixed jusy by playing them with an emulator? The midi's sound a LOT closer to what I remember the songs sounding like. I guess I always could just buy a 486, and relive the good old days ;-)

Back to the emulator, I had read in other threads that you can get a different players with different (and this is where my knowledge drops off) *things* to make it sound like the original. Does anyone have a preferred player? I appreciate your expertise! Lastly, I am looking for a copy of doom II- I lost mine =(

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The MP2 is an older incarnation of the MP3, so you can't change the way it sounds too much.

What operating system and what engine are you using to play DOOM?

As for getting DOOM II; try id Software's site, eBay, or other on-line (PC game) shops.

id also sells the games as downloads, although the Collector's Edition costs about as much as any one game, and you get them all in a single CD.

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I built this computer specifically to play some classic Doom

P4 3.06 Ghz
1024 meg pc3200 RAM
ATI X800 SE 128 meg video card
Windows XP service pack 1
Ultimate Doom w/ Zdoom
Integrated sound -_-

;-) I have messed around with the OPL sound and it sounds closer to the original that the newer stuff.

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Mr.Clutchpants said:

I built this computer specifically to play some classic Doom

Not with xp.

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Well, If you use Windows 98 (like I), you'll enjoy DOOM and DOOM2.exe at their best (don't use doom95, it sucks hard).

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The original dooms? I remember mine was on however many floppies, but it had a blue screen with 'Seal' something written on it. I dont know if that was the load screen or the install screen, but thats all I remember. Hows it sound?

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For the music with old dos doom.exe, my SB Live Platinum is awesome, except one song, e2m8's, one of the most badass ominous ones, is screwed up. The sounds of the main instrument in it are horribly cut off short. That song is much better on the old SB AWE 32 in my parent's computer.

I think even Sycraft's awesome OGG remixes misses the mark on capturing how that particular song should sound. Speaking of which, those OGG soundtracks are great, but currently I think you can only use them with Doomsday.

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Gokuma said:

those OGG soundtracks are great, but currently I think you can only use them with Doomsday.



ZDoom supports OGG as well.

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Sweet Cuppin' Cakes. I have been talking to an old friend of mine and his parents still have an old P200. I think I will dust that bad boy off and have a go. Also on the way is the Original Doom II. Original- as in floppies. Its going to be a hot christmas.

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Mr.Clutchpants said:

Sweet Cuppin' Cakes. I have been talking to an old friend of mine and his parents still have an old P200. I think I will dust that bad boy off and have a go. Also on the way is the Original Doom II. Original- as in floppies. Its going to be a hot christmas.


If you do that, you could then try recording the tunes as wav files and converting them to mp3's (which ZDoom supports). If you have the means to do so, and the desire to fiddle around with recording stuff. (I did this with one tune and it works just like it used to on my old P200 with sound blaster compatible card)

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i recently had to switch from win2k+sp4 to xp+sp1 due to that rbot pest... under 2k, i could set midi music as loud as i wanted it to be from the game menu, now i have to fiddle with wave playback settings in windows' sound effects control panel.

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My Sound Blaster Pro made every single MUS in Doom 1 sound like gold. MIDI pussifies all of the instruments. God, I wish I could dig up that computer.

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Deathmatcher said:

I think, you can play around with the sound drivers in ZDoom. One of the options should sound like the original.


Yes

Zdoom's more recent versions have an excellent FM OPL2 emulator that can be enabled by opl_enable 1 and then snd_reset. The only drawback i know of is the cpu usage, which probably won't matter since you don't have a p2 400mhz and older anyways.

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heh... I still have my 386 in my house... fire that bad boy up get to listen to the original music AND watch doom II lag like crazy....

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as has been remarked, there's really no such thing as 'the original' music. the MP3s linked earlier in this thread are the closest you can get, cos they're how Bobby Prince meant them to sound when he wrote the music; at the time, MIDI-based music in games was highly popular, and the people who wrote it used Roland equipment to a man. Most people would recall the sound of the OPL2 synth on Sound Blaster cards as 'the original' because that's what most people had, but it's not how MIDI's really supposed to work. You're supposed to have a card with actual recordings of the original instruments stored on it, and MIDI tells the card how to play back those recordings. (This is called 'wavetable'). Cheap cards like the Sound Blaster didn't have such recordings (you needed on-card memory for this, and on-card memory was *expensive*) - they had a general-purpose synth chip which they tried to make sound as much like whatever instrument the MIDI called for as possible.

Modern cards generally don't have proper wavetables either...because they don't need to. Proper musician cards still do, I think, but consumer ones don't. Hardly any games use midi-type music any more, and if they want to, they can easily do MIDI emulation in software with samples stored on hard disk. On Linux systems, TiMidity does this.

I still remember I bought a wavetable *add-on daughterboard* for a sound card I had at one point in order to get better sound in Doom. Upgrading from a Sound Blaster to that was a revelation :)

btw, fun factoid - the 'polyphonic ringtones' on many cellphones are in fact just MIDI files, and the phones play 'em just like old-skool soundcards, using cheap synths. I can upload midi files direct to my phone - Ericsson T610 - and use them as ringtones. I've got most of the Doom songs on there...:)

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That there has been the single definitive answer I have feared. I was arriving to that conclusion on my own, much to my chargin I might add, but I still held reservations that it might not be true. Thanks for the answer, though somewhat disheartening news. Time to start looking for a new computer circa 1993! talk to you guys later!

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