WC1&2 Audio Sound Comparison Presented In Easy Playlist Form (January 7, 2018)

[ChrisReid]

pcuser1541 has put together a number of videos that showcase the wide variety of audio setups supported by the original Wing Commander games. SoundBlaster was the most common card of the day, but the Roland MT-32 was highly sought after early on and new variants continued to be released through numerous ports over nearly half a dozen years. There are examples from the Microsoft GS, FM Towns, Amiga, Macintosh, Super Nintendo and Sega CD. The 'Audio CD' portion comes from the Origin Audio Volumes rather than the wav music included with Kilrathi Saga. Different fans have posted similar comparisons over the years, but I'm not sure anyone has posted quite so many variants of a dozen different tracks all in one set of videos like this. You can find many of these audio samples in the CIC Music section, but check them out below for easy convenient listening. After clicking play on the segments embedded below, click the icon in the top left of each window for a playlist dropdown to allow you to jump to six different WC1 and six different WC2 sound files. If that doesn't work for some reason, find all of the clips here.

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Original update published on January 7, 2018

 

[Worf]

Nice. It's a pity he didn't try using a proper GM synth other than the crap known as Microsoft GS. Even though Microsoft licensed it from Roland, they cut practically everything out of it. Even for a 2MB sample bank, it sounds like crap (the MT-32 is 512kb, and SC-55 I believe is also 2MB and both sound much better).

I've run some of the MIDI through the nicest synth I have (Roland Integra 7). It adds an interesting flavor to the sound as some of its PCM bank use it's "supernatural" synthesis engine to generate the audio that includes instrument variations that a musician would do. (Not all instruments are simulated - just a few of them, the rest are regular samples).