Sound Blaster was the standard... The Rolands were harder to find, more expensive and had somewhat less universal support. I don't recall ever actually seeing one in a store. Or perhaps I did, and didn't even realize what it was at the time, because Sound Blasters were synonymous with sound cards at the time.
I wouldn't say they didn't have universal support; if anything, they actually were more universal than the wavetable sound cards battling it out circa 1990 (Sound Blaster, SoundScape, Game Blaster, AdLib, etc.) All of those cards supported MIDI music the same way because Roland set that standard (... and produced the only consumer PC devices...), and then they had vast differences in how they did regular sound. But there are several reasons why you don't remember seeing them!
- Functionality. The MT-32 played incredible music (and a few cool sound effects)... but it wasn't a sound card. It lacked the capacity for FM synthesis, which meant you could never play a game that had its own unique sounds (or, most important to people at the time, speech.) While that wasn't common in the age of single diskette titles, storage technology moved quickly and allowed developers to do great things with their own sounds instead of a pre-stocked library. We also tend to forget that you didn't just buy a Sound Blaster because it played sounds... they were veritable swiss army cards, giving you a game port and (especially early on) a disk controller (needed to add hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc. to your computer.) In fact, you needed to have either a Sound Blaster equivalent or a dedicated game port card in order to use an MT-32 in the first place! (Though not for the internal Roland LAPC-I card version.)
- Cost. The Roland devices cost 2-3x the price of a Sound Blaster. The MT-32 was $550 and the LAPC-I was $425... which equates to $900-$1200 in today's dollars! One of the ways Sound Blaster took the market share early was lowering their price to kill the competition. By the time Wing Commander came out, a new Sound Blaster was $150, which was insanely cheap for what you got! (The game controller card you'd need to buy to use the MT-32 itself without additional sounds would have been half that.)
- Availability/promotion. Roland is not a game company and did not promote their products to game players. You mentioned not remembering seeing them in stores, and you almost certainly wouldn't. They were stocked at music stores and high end computer stores... and they wouldn't have stood out at all. Where the Sound Blaster packaging was a hip blue (later blue and yellow) package with callouts and graphics, Roland items came in simple white boxes with their model number stenciled on. What really made Roland tech accessible to gamers in the late 80s that we remember today was Sierra On-Line doing the legwork themselves for their adventure games. They opted to support LA MIDI and promoted it heavily with their games... even sending out tapes like this video that showed players the difference! And then you could order your MT-32 or LAPC-I directly through InterAction magazine.
- And finally, age. The MT-32 premiered in 1987 and the Sound Blaster in 1989 (though it didn't stand out from the pack until 1990.) That seems like the same time to us, but you have to remember that personal computing was evolving at light speed at the time. Product cycles were measured in months instead of years like they are today... so by the time Wing Commander came out, LA MIDI was in a sharp decline (GS MIDI would replace it entirely the next year.)
Also important to remember that it generally wasn't a choice, either: the Roland equipment was an add-on to an existing sound card that would play some stock effects and amazing music. But if you wanted both cool sounds/speech and Roland music, you needed two devices (and you generally needed two devices to use a Roland synth in the first place.) So it's not so much you had to choose between a cheap Sound Blaster and an expensive MIDI device... you had to get a Sound Blaster and then consider upgrading to better music for a LOT of money. (This is exactly why games in the late 80s and early 90s ask you to select your sound card and your music card separately, if you ever wondered about that!)
Anyway, he showed off one for his Day of the Tentacle show, and once I saw it was supported by TIE Fighter and the first two Wing Commanders, I had to have it. After a ton of work getting it to properly run, I've been running it in a variety of games. I'm so giddy about it I wanted to share it with y'all, so I hope you enjoy this little jaunt to the past.
