KS Music transfer to original game

Sylvester

Sylvester

Vice Admiral
I love the music of Wing Commander. And about the only thing that I liked from the Kilrathi Saga ports of Wing Commander 1 and 2 was the remastered music. I own both the original and the KS versions of the game. Is there anyway I can replace the music in the original games with the KS music?
 
Nope,

You can however in Dosbox emulate a Gravis ultrasound and in turn use that virtual card to emulate a Roland MT-32(using Mega-Em and the sample set). And yes, it's a bit complex. The alternative is getting an older machine 486/pentium1 and an ultrasound(cheap on ebay or a second hand shop) or a real MT-32(those are hard to come by).
 
I have a gus and SB16 at home in a p120, and i have never thought about using megaem to do that... - now i'm gonna have to try it on dosbox!
 
Just out of curiosity, if you have KS, why do you need to? I mean just play it on KS, seems a lot of work for the same result...
 
Some people seem to have trouble running KS on modern systems, while playing the originals with DOSbox works better for them.

Also, KS apparently misses those images in the star background (like planet, galaxy, ...)
 
Prometheus said:
Some people seem to have trouble running KS on modern systems, while playing the originals with DOSbox works better for them.

Also, KS apparently misses those images in the star background (like planet, galaxy, ...)
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I see.. I'll have to go back and play to see that for myself, I don't remember.
 
Hmm...maybe i'm doing something wrong, because when I select Roland for the sound options in the WC install (inside Dosbox), the sounds don't seem as advanced or detailed.
 
There's your problem, KS and Wing4 don't use MIDI synthesys, they playback digitally recorded music, hence the sound difference.

GUS sets up it's wavetable to emulate an MT32 sample set through Mega-em, make sure you use the -MT32 flag when you run it(and have the correct sample set);
ftp://ftp.gravis.com/Public/Sound/Obsolete/

And the card was meant purely for music, not soundfx, so yes, your mass drivers sound like a xylophone.
 
Sylvester said:
So you're saying the music will sound better, but the sound effects will be crap?
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Do WC1 and 2 even have sound effects? I got around to 'em late and experienced them through dosbox with a soundblaster selected in the game installs.

I tired a MUNT-derived MT-32 emulation and the music did sound better, but tended to really screw up on the dynamic cues in-flight.

But in both cases there were almost no sound-effects. The aforementioned Xylophone for gunfire, a sort of sputtering sound for explosions, and a soft static-like noise for the afterburners ...

All in all I like the KS versions better, background art or no ...
 
Mace said:
Nope,

You can however in Dosbox emulate a Gravis ultrasound and in turn use that virtual card to emulate a Roland MT-32(using Mega-Em and the sample set). And yes, it's a bit complex. The alternative is getting an older machine 486/pentium1 and an ultrasound(cheap on ebay or a second hand shop) or a real MT-32(those are hard to come by).
Click to expand...

Unless this has changed in dosbox 0.74 - megaem won't run in dosbox meaning that the emulation is impossible. Did you get it to work? if so how?
 
Madman said:
Unless this has changed in dosbox 0.74 - megaem won't run in dosbox meaning that the emulation is impossible. Did you get it to work? if so how?
Click to expand...

Indeed. I enabled the Gravis emulation and downloaded all the necessary sample and configuration files, including Mega-Em. Mega-Em requires that the EMS manager be VCPI compliant, which DosBox doesn't emulate. If you disable EMS in the config file, Mega-Em still won't run, because now it can't detect an expanded memory manager.
 
But in both cases there were almost no sound-effects. The aforementioned Xylophone for gunfire, a sort of sputtering sound for explosions, and a soft static-like noise for the afterburners ...
Click to expand...
To my recollection, the sound effects in the DOS versions of WC1/2 were just different from the Kilrathi Saga version, but not worse.
 
Madman said:
Unless this has changed in dosbox 0.74 - megaem won't run in dosbox meaning that the emulation is impossible. Did you get it to work? if so how?
Click to expand...

Disabling Dosbox's default Expanded memory manager, only allocate XMS and use MS-DOS included(I used 5.0's) EMM386. (also limit your amount of RAM to 4096KB)

Note: I did not do this using normal Dosbox, I did it with DosXbox, wich in turn is an Xport-port of Dosbox.

And yes, when the music changes you get an initial slowdown(this however gets loaded into cache)

...But the best option for GUS-to-MT32 emulation is obtaining an old computer from a garage sale...
 
Mace said:
...But the best option for GUS-to-MT32 emulation is obtaining an old computer from a garage sale...
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure dosbox will already map MT32 music to your regular windows MIDI player by makind sure emulation is enabled in your config file. The main problem is that your windows MIDI mapper doesn't have the original custom sound samples from the MT32.

The only real wierdness that I've encountered is that it tries to use sounds from that canvas to use for the sound effects. In those instances, the crappy adlib/sound blaster effects sound miles better than that. Later games (WC2 and Priv IIRC) Let you choose music and sound effect drivers independantly.
 
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