06. April 2016, 02:29:23

#15

ScorpionQuote

You're better off using BASSMIDI anyways. Linky

I never really bothered to mess around with it or even bother to get it to work properly (Music would stop playing after any sound effect was used in-game).

06. April 2016, 17:57:25

#16

Wild PenguinQuote

I'm a Linux user, so I actually prefer Timidity or Fluidsynth (I think it doesn't actually matter that much which softsynth is used, except for some effects; at least I can not hear any difference between FluidSynth and Timidity++ if I use the same soundfont and similar effect settings - their defaults differ somewhat).

I think the GUS support is just a nice thing to have and test out - some games still sound better with GUS support than any soundfont I've used (with GM emulation). So, although the GM is quite good in this case, GUS would be nice to compare to - and the GUS support is almost there! At least it was complete and working with the floppy version. Too bad the floppy version is low-res only (and with mono digital samples / non-directional sound or something, though I'm not sure about the differences).

[OT]: With games, I find that often times a bigger soundfont with gigabytes of samples is worse than a smaller one. I think this has something to do with the instruments not being balanced the way the game composers had when they made the music; these old games have no knowledge of what is being used for the synthesis. IMO, MT32 (emulation - don't own the real thing) is usually best option if the game supports it, and GM is usually inferior to GUS support if both are available. Often GM is even worse - despite the soundfont being used - than AWE32, although that only had a 512kb 1MiB ROM! (and, sadly there is no AWE32 emulation available, only GM soundfonts which do not sound anything like the real thing!)

But these things are very subjective, I must admit. And - as it is said - whatever the user heard first (back in the day) will sound best forever for him/her  [/OT]

Acknowledged by: Scorpion

07. April 2016, 19:32:08

#17

ScorpionQuote

Closest thing I could find that "sorta" adds GUS music was an eawpats soundfont that Bashe made on the Zdoom forums. Here's a link to that.

There are GUS soundfonts out there as well but as far as I know there's no real "good" one that exists.
Another thing I'd like to point out is that the classic edition of System Shock on Gog has some GUS patches in the installation folder, but I never bothered to test them. The eawpats soundfont was close enough for me