Ultima Underworld Music/Sound

[CarlosTex]

#9456

You might want to talk about this on the podcast, some info you might find useful:

This game uses John Miles Audio Interface Library 2 drivers. The drivers have the .ADV extension, music files are .XMI and voices are .VOC.

The game supports PC Speaker, Adlib, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro and Roland MT-32.

For the people running DOSBox i recommend setting the OPL for Sound Blaster Pro 1, this game has a stereo dual OPL2 soundtrack, and it sounds better with that than if you have the OPL set to Sound Blaster Pro 2, since it will try to simulate an OPL3.

And no, an OPL3 alone can’t replicate 2 OPL2 chips, it’s just not possible.

For people using real hardware, if you don’t have a Sound Blaster Pro 1 card and instead have the original dual OPL2 Pro Audio Spectrum all you have to do is to select Sound Blaster Pro for music and then replace the SBP1FM.ADV by the PASFM.ADV driver. Essentially your Pro Audio Spectrum will play the dual OPL2 soundtrack just fine. For speech the same can be done, replace the SBPDIG.ADV driver by the PASDIG.ADV.

Needless to say, the voice acting is extremely cheesy, tries to be almost Shakespearean but ends up being cringe as f.

For the Roland devices is better to use the Roland CM-32L, or the internal ISA version LAPC-I (it’s the letter I for IBM not the number 1). The reason is that the CM-32L/LAPC-I devices have an extra 33 sound effects that are used in the game. The Roland MT-32 will play the soundtrack just fine, but during the game these specific sound effects will be missing where they are used.

[patrick_wd]

#9457

Yeah, I’m a big fan of synth-chip lore, FM chips in particular. UW is one of the few games to be designed for the SBPro v1 before the industry quickly moved on to OPL3, so it’s definitely worth discussing on the episode.

An OPL3 could theoretically reproduce dual-OPL2 soundtracks, but it would require a special driver to translate the register writes. The main limitation would be if both chips independently use their rhythm sections, since the OPL3 only has one. To my knowledge nobody has actually attempted this, but dual-OPL2 games are relatively rare so the demand is likely too low to be worth it.

[TigerQuoll]

#9458

Oooh, that’s interesting. I’ve been playing on hardware with a Soundblaster 2 (not Pro). Sounds good to me, but never knew I was missing part of the experience.

I knew games that take advantage of the Pro 1’s dual OPLs were rare, but I never realised this title was one of them.

[firefyte]

#9459

Does this also translate into the sequel, I somewhat assumed they didn’t change the engine much?

[CarlosTex]

#9461

@tigerquoll

Yeah if you are playing on real hardware then might be harder to get the full experience. A real Sound Blaster Pro 1 or a Pro Audio Spectrum are difficult cards to get. The PAS is specially uncommon and commands a high price. I have both and the PAS is by far the superior card, although yeah a Sound Blaster is a Sound Blaster. The original PAS however being early to the Sound Card party back in the days did get a LOT of support.

@firefyte
Yes it did translate to the sequel. UW2 still uses AIL2, although for some reason they changed the standard filenames for something else. I haven’t checked UW2 in detail.

[firefyte]

#9485

Just checked, for UW2, they are still in the same XMI format, so easy to open.