[Duke of Hazzard]

This is something I really didn't know about before coming to this forum. I used to think people relied on emulation to run old stuff nowadays but it seems there are still people who can build 90s era PCs and have them running well. High Treason has a Win98 machine he does his LPs with.

I personally wouldn't build one myself because I don't know how to build a desktop myself and also because I don't have space for another desktop. But, for the people who own a retro machine, how easy is it to build one? I thought most hardware parts were either lost or worn, and boxed ones can cost more than new budget ones.

[The Commander]

Duke of Hazzard, on 01 May 2014 - 03:40 PM, said:

High Treason has a Win98 machine he does his LPs with.

I think that is because no one has told him 2014 yet, he is still living in the 90's.

[MusicallyInspired]

I've got three computers for different eras. Actually, it's looking like I'll need a fourth now (for older post-2002/2003 Windows games). I have my main system which plays mostly up-to-date games fairly well. My second is a Win98 box with a Voodoo 1 addon card with a Matrox Mystique. Very nice for early 3D games with Glide support. I also have a 486 DX2/66 with a Trident VESA card and an AWE32 for a near complete DOS gaming experience (minus the early DOS Glide games). It's not really that hard at all. Though, I've been building and tinkering with computers since I was 12. The key is finding hardware. I found most of my equipment in yard sales and a few online. Still more were hand-me-downs I got from my dad's old systems. I hold onto that junk. It's amazing what you can find in a yard sale or thrift store, though. Sometimes they don't know what they have and you can find gold for dirt cheap in excellent condition.

[Person of Color]

I've been doing this for years, and I can tell you some pretty solid advice right out of the gate:

If you don't know how to build computers, don't bother building one with legacy hardware. Grab an old computer at a garage sale. By all means, do that! It's awesome. Just remove the crappy stock soundcard and buy a Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230 model only), Sound Blaster AWE32, or AWE64 off eBay.

It's a completely different experience than DOSBox. It's really authentic. The sound quality is better, everything loads at a more realistic pace, you get the lovely old hard drive whine along with the loud ass access sounds, it's the tits.

In case your curious, here's why you shouldn't build a legacy system with your level of knowledge:

-This hardware is old, and some of it is dying. I built Coryyne a top of the line, bleeding edge retro box with a P-233, 4MB S3 ViRGE/325, 12MB Vooodoo2, AWE32 8MB, and shit tons of hard drive space. Half the damn shit in my closet had died or was dying. I even had to resort to cracking open the Baby AT power supply and soldering in a new fan. If you have problems during initial assembly, testing these things can be a nightmare. Hardest build I've ever done due to luck of the draw. Chances are old parts have been moved and thrown around for years, and that doesn't help. A prebuilt system will sit in a tough metal box in a closet.

-Configuring retro hardware is challenging. Most Pentium 1 era equipment that isn't from a pre-assembled PC uses the Baby AT form factor, which is a rewarding nightmare to work with. In addition to that, the CPU on a Socket 7 system needs manual configuration with jumpers, and on those older systems, you're talking about anywhere between 5-10 jumpers you have to manually set, sometimes more with Super 7 boards. Unless you know bus speed, multiplier, voltages, all that technical shit, you're fucked. Oh, and vintage cases will cut your hands up like that Crip on 22nd and Martin Luther King Blvd.

-Plug and Play used to be called "Plug and Pray" for a reason. It doesn't work well on Windows 9x systems, especially with those crappy winmodems. A prebuilt system from a vendor generally won't have PnP issues as often as off the shelf stuff, with the exception of some craptastic systems from Compaq and Packard Bell.

Start with a Pentium 1 era box. Go for at least a Pentium 166MHz. Pentium II's will cause many older games that rely on framerate for game pacing to play way too fast, namely Descent. Actually, even on a P-200, Descent runs a bit faster than it should. Also, try to make sure the computer you are buying has L2 cache. Some prebuilt systems omitted it to save money, it's a 30% performance hit without it.

If you're given a selection of systems, get anything Dell (Dimension or Optiplex). You can't go wrong with a vintage Dell. I'd also highly recommend Compaq Deskpros, or HP Vectras. These are all top shelf quality systems that didn't have any corners cut. They are very reliable and they will all have L2 cache. Alternatively, buy whatever you can find and hope for the best. You can get these things at thrift shops for $20, so who cares?

[High Treason]

Duke of Hazzard, on 01 May 2014 - 03:40 PM, said:

High Treason has a Win98 machine he does his LPs with.

And many more, check My YouTube if you want a look inside them (including the Win98 box),

The Commander, on 01 May 2014 - 06:28 PM, said:

I think that is because no one has told him 2014 yet, he is still living in the 90's.

You don't know how much I wish that were true. Having seen that thread about Ritual and not knowing wtf it was about though, you may be partially right. At least I'm not upside down.


My personal recommendation would be to start with a Super Socket 7 system. Avoid OEM like Dell, Compaq and especially IBM. Elitists love those but they use propriatery parts that are expensive and can be hard to find.

Start with a Super Socket 7 machine, very flexible. You can even find those with ATX motherboards and the will usually run anyhing from Pentium 75's up to K6 550's. They're a good starting point because they are close enough to a modern machine that you can get a better grasp on how to assemble it but the legacy support and compatibility is there, you also have the flexibility to slow it down if it goes too fast. Otherwise, mostly what Viper said, unfortunately.

[Person of Color]

High Treason, on 02 May 2014 - 12:55 PM, said:

Avoid OEM like Dell, Compaq and especially IBM. Elitists love those but they use propriatery parts that are expensive and can be hard to find.

I completely disagree with this statement. There were an epidemic of mom and pop shops with poor quality components back in the 90's, at least in the United States. There were lots of bad big OEMs too, but the good ones were much more reliable than most brick and mortar machines.

Like I said before, if you have a variety of systems on a rack at a thrift shop, a good proprietary system will ship with far less compromises. A good quality OEM machine will have L2 cache, a good video card (Not some Trident or SiS shit), a better quality power supply and motherboard, and you won't find a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive lurking inside it.

Getting vintage parts for these proprietary systems can be a pain, but the bottom line is that they are $20 a pop, you can buy three of them and you can move on to the next one when it dies. If you really want to keep a system, pay out the ass to get everything recapped...capacitors on these older machines are going to start shitting their pants within the next five years. It's already hard to find a good Model 1 Genesis.

I know there's a lot of information here, but don't get confused. Start hitting up thrift shops and garage sales. If you're not too sure about a machine, buy it anyway. Ask us about it. If it sucks, get rid of it or keep it as a spare. This shit is cheap, so who cares?

And hey man, sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. One of the best retro computers I ever owned was a Packard Bell, if you can believe that...really great machine.

[MusicallyInspired]

I had a 486 DX2/66 Packard Bell with PCI slots and onboard video. That was pretty nice. Not sure what happened to it actually. Had two levers to take the case off. It also had an infrared receiver and built in Ethernet and PS/2 connections. It was this fantastic modern-style old computer. Never seen anything like it before. Put a Voodoo card in it.

[High Treason]

Protected by Viper, on 03 May 2014 - 07:15 AM, said:

I completely disagree with this statement. There were an epidemic of mom and pop shops with poor quality components back in the 90's, at least in the United States. There were lots of bad big OEMs too, but the good ones were much more reliable than most brick and mortar machines.

Even on the IBM side of things? In my part of the world it was a different story, you could buy big-brand stuff but it was too expensive and everyone knew someone (or knew someone that knew someone) who was a computer guy, so 90% of systems around here were custom builds.

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Like I said before, if you have a variety of systems on a rack at a thrift shop, a good proprietary system will ship with far less compromises. A good quality OEM machine will have L2 cache, a good video card (Not some Trident or SiS shit), a better quality power supply and motherboard, and you won't find a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive lurking inside it.

I've never seen an OEM from the Pentium era that didn't have a Cirrus card in it. Except the Tiny which had an S3 Virge installed, great for DOS games, just a shame about the shoddy motherboard but being off-the-shelf gear it was easy to replace with a better one. Your propriatery motherboard will have an inbuilt chip and that could be a problem as you cannot replace the mother board and may not be able to replace the chip if it goes wrong, and sometimes upgrades go out of the window because there are boards that don't like you using a seperate graphics card.

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Getting vintage parts for these proprietary systems can be a pain, but the bottom line is that they are $20 a pop, you can buy three of them and you can move on to the next one when it dies. If you really want to keep a system, pay out the ass to get everything recapped...capacitors on these older machines are going to start shitting their pants within the next five years. It's already hard to find a good Model 1 Genesis.

Most collectors agree that you should have started re-capping a few years ago. I still haven't done anything other than boards that have blown them (Tantalum sucks). There's also no shortage of MK1 Mega Drives in the UK. But you rate a very good point on the PC side of things, for $20 you can't go wrong so if you're in a place where that's an option it may be a good one, over here these things are hard to find and cost hundreds of pounds, hence I usually import things.

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And hey man, sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. One of the best retro computers I ever owned was a Packard Bell, if you can believe that...really great machine.

I have a Pulsar 16 that I like. But it was always a bitch to handle the expansion cards due to the CPU being placed under the slots and due to the lack of these slots I cannot get around the failed video chip. It has other problems now anyway and I'm hoping I can find the spare motherboard I kept. On the other hand, I've no idea what they did to the Triton II chipset because it's slower than any other socket 7 motherboard I have, in fact, at 100MHz it proved slower than the temperamental Mercury-based Socket 4 board (60MHz Pentium, as used by Gateway) I used. Best OEM I have? The little Leo I posted some time ago that came out of a bulgarian bank with it's hard drive intact.


I'm merely posting this so it can be observed from both sides better. In short I guess it depends on your location. Performance-wise though you have no chance of catchin up to non-propriatery systems as there are so many things you can alter. But in your part of the world you have the price advantage.I must admit though, I'm rather tempted to derail the thread into a 3DFX argument.

[Person of Color]

High Treason, on 03 May 2014 - 07:50 AM, said:

Even on the IBM side of things? In my part of the world it was a different story, you could buy big-brand stuff but it was too expensive and everyone knew someone (or knew someone that knew someone) who was a computer guy, so 90% of systems around here were custom builds.

Yeah the U.S. was hit and miss with mom and pop shops.

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I've never seen an OEM from the Pentium era that didn't have a Cirrus card in it. Except the Tiny which had an S3 Virge installed, great for DOS games, just a shame about the shoddy motherboard but being off-the-shelf gear it was easy to replace with a better one. Your propriatery motherboard will have an inbuilt chip and that could be a problem as you cannot replace the mother board and may not be able to replace the chip if it goes wrong, and sometimes upgrades go out of the window because there are boards that don't like you using a seperate graphics card.

Most of the systems in the U.S. were S3 or ATI. Higher end computers (Like Dell Optiplexes) had Matrox cards.

If he's getting a machine for casual use onboard won't matter. Onboard was different back then - it was a legit card built into the motherboard. I've seen some really good integrated stuff, everything from ViRGEs to Mach64's, even a Riva TNT. Besides that onboard stuff rarely fails.

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Most collectors agree that you should have started re-capping a few years ago. I still haven't done anything other than boards that have blown them (Tantalum sucks). There's also no shortage of MK1 Mega Drives in the UK. But you rate a very good point on the PC side of things, for $20 you can't go wrong so if you're in a place where that's an option it may be a good one, over here these things are hard to find and cost hundreds of pounds, hence I usually import things.

Yeah thrift stores in the U.S. are really cheap.

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I'm merely posting this so it can be observed from both sides better. In short I guess it depends on your location. Performance-wise though you have no chance of catchin up to non-propriatery systems as there are so many things you can alter. But in your part of the world you have the price advantage.I must admit though, I'm rather tempted to derail the thread into a 3DFX argument.

If you're just doing DOS/Win95 era gaming, honestly there isn't THAT much of an advantage to a system with industry standard parts. If you're going to P2 era stuff it's better to have a machine without integrated video and stuff.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Protected by Viper, on 03 May 2014 - 07:15 AM, said:

I completely disagree with this statement. There were an epidemic of mom and pop shops with poor quality components back in the 90's, at least in the United States. There were lots of bad big OEMs too, but the good ones were much more reliable than most brick and mortar machines.

Like I said before, if you have a variety of systems on a rack at a thrift shop, a good proprietary system will ship with far less compromises. A good quality OEM machine will have L2 cache, a good video card (Not some Trident or SiS shit), a better quality power supply and motherboard, and you won't find a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive lurking inside it.

Getting vintage parts for these proprietary systems can be a pain, but the bottom line is that they are $20 a pop, you can buy three of them and you can move on to the next one when it dies. If you really want to keep a system, pay out the ass to get everything recapped...capacitors on these older machines are going to start shitting their pants within the next five years. It's already hard to find a good Model 1 Genesis.

I know there's a lot of information here, but don't get confused. Start hitting up thrift shops and garage sales. If you're not too sure about a machine, buy it anyway. Ask us about it. If it sucks, get rid of it or keep it as a spare. This shit is cheap, so who cares?

And hey man, sometimes you find diamonds in the rough. One of the best retro computers I ever owned was a Packard Bell, if you can believe that...really great machine.

I *think* I may still have my Model 1 Genesis around somewhere. Not sure it still works, though, and most of my carts are worthless because they're counterfeit. The one machine I wanted to preserve for posterity is my N64. I wouldn't get much off of selling it anyway as my collection is missing Zelda and other big titles.

I live in Brazil, so it *might* be easier to get old stuff, on the other hand there's not a "culture" of preserving old hardware here I think, so most stuff is trashed. Companies still use XP-era hardware, though, so there might be a good chance of finding old stuff. I'd have to do a little research.

I have a question about sound... Why is Sound Blaster preferred? I had a Sound Blaster in the past and loved the music it provided, but after hearing MIDIs recorded through other cards, I think they're vastly superior because the synths seem to be proper synths as opposed to Sound Blaster "blippy" and "zoinky" stuff. Even the Microsoft fonts with their horrible guitar synths are superior.

My main problem, though, is space. My apartment is really small and I don't have space for anything.

[High Treason]

The Sound Balster was popular simply because it was compatible with almost everything as far as games went. The Demoscene first favoured home-made Covoxes and later the GUS and this leaked into games mostly by devs who were from the scene, such as Epic and maybe Terminal Reality.

From a hardware perspective, almost everything Creative ever made was awful, it sounded bad, it had poor manafacturing quality and that was the small amount of stuff Creative did themselves, most things were off-the-shelf or only slightly modified; namely the DSP on the original card was the only component specific to Creative, a slightly modified controller from Intel.

Still, I like the Sound Blaster / AdLib sound for the most part, it has a charm to it.

If you can only find XP-era stuff, look out for a Pentium 3. Some of them had ISA slots and they should run quite a few old games (Keen, Duke, Quake etc), just not really old ones. NEC used Gigabyte boards of reasonable quality in a standard form factor, usually had an ISA slot and many of theirs supported the VIA C3 in case you wanted to slow it down a little. If there's no ISA you can kinda cheat with sound as there were a few PCI cards that do a decent job like the early CMI-8738, ESS-based cards and others but they can be harder to track down. Give the SB128/ES137x/CT5880 a miss though.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Yeah when I said there were better cards I was referring to the GUS. In modern PCs, though, the point is moot because modern source ports allow you to use recorded audio and the top stuff seems to be Roland SC-55 recorded tunes.

The SB has a charm to it because it sounds "gamey" and "old-fashioned" even for that time. Grabbag doesn't sound too bad with it (in fact it's one of my favorite versions).

[High Treason]

SC-55? What a horrible, horrible little module that thing is, at least from a composer's perspective, personally I don't like the sound of it either, the drums are horrible. The MT-32 was worse, the Roland D-50 was a horrible keyboard to start with and I never heard any good music written with one, but only Roland - the company that brought the world the off-key sounds of the Jupiter - could think it was a good idea to stick the guts of one into a little black box (There's a white one called CM-32 as well, they made loads of these things). Much like the Sound Blaster, there was better stuff out there such as Yamaha's MU series but nobody supported it properly.

One thing I've learned over the years is if you want something new and are stuck for what you should get, find the most badly made, cut-corners shittiest technology available and use that because everyone else has a habbit of doing it and it'll likely be what everything works with in the future. I could sit here and list a million examples easily but I won't.

[Person of Color]

What are you talking about? The MT-32 is really neat. Anything Sound Canvas is fucking terrible though...

[High Treason]

Have you ever tried to write music for one? It ignores several standard MIDI instructions or executes them incorrectly - yeah, not like Roland were a major player in standardizing those or anything - several patches are out of tune and there is no tuning adjustment as far as I can tell, the polyphony is complete garbage, pitch bend and modulation are completely random, the master volume is determined by the data sent which sucks when you have an overly enthusiastic Line Input and have set it to 40 only to fire up Leisure Suit Larry where it jumps to 99 and blows your ear drums and that's just a few of the features, the actual sound - piss weak, thin and whiny - is awful, the physical characteristics suck because it's a stupid shape and uses crappy buttons not to mention that stupid display panel in it. Also, like anything with a Roland logo on it the damn thing is overpriced. I've used a variety of products and I can honestly say that in my opinion Roland never made anything good.

[MusicallyInspired]

You are not allowed to speak so ill of the holy MT-32. Sure the onboard sounds left a little to be desired, but you could program you're own sounds with extremely high results. The MT-32 is a magical box of awesome.

The Sound Canvas could have been better. Luckily it was. The SC-8820 is quite good. As well as the SC-8850.

[High Treason]

Yeah this happens everywhere, yet like your post, nobody ever tries to counter the issues I've presented and I left the biggest one off the list, so I can't take people who defend it seriously. Do you like it because you like it personally? I can respect that, but I cannot say it is a good module in any way. Or, do you like it because you were told to, everyone else does and it has a Roland logo on it?

Roland - The company that brought you an analog synthesizer made with 70's technology in 2012.... And just about every other bloody year, with a ridiculous price tag. Sounds like a reputable company to me.

Here, I have a challenge for you, if the MT-32 is so great, how about I send you the .MID/.WRK files from a Casio CZ-1000 song and you try to get an MT-32 to reproduce it to the same standard? It's hardly fair, the CZ-1000 is two years older, doesn't use a sample-based engine and was a low-cost synthesizer but I doubt if the MT-32 could do a good job of it. I vote using this one. You can use an external drum machine too if you want, why not get an 808 or an LM2 hooked up so I have another product's inferior design to poke fun at? I'm not even a good musician - nor can I call myself one as I can't read music - and even I can tell that the LA engine was horrible.

P.S. I'd like to see this SC-88XX outperform my MU90R, ain't gonna happen in a million years. You might be in with a chance if you get a JV-1080 but it's still not really in the same league.



As the internet is serious business these days I'd like to state that this is all in good fun and I respect people's opinions.

[Tea Monster]

"Retro" is a machine with 3.11 or just DOS on board and an AdLIb sound card.

Early Packard Bells were OK. Whatever you do, don't get one of the later pentiums with a Miro MWave sound card. There is a story behind that thing.

Loads of local computer shops used PC Chips and other abominations of nature in their boxes. but they did tend to swear by them, not at them, and a lot of these places built successful businesses out of shifting this stuff.

[MusicallyInspired]

The buffer overflow and checksum errors are due to fast computers. Get a slow enough system (or slow down the cpu cycles in Dosbox) and the problem disappears. This problem was solved in 2nd generation MT-32s.

And yes, I personally like it. Not only does it produce amazing results in game soundtracks that utilize its potential to the fullest (mostly Sierra adventure games), but I use it in my own personal compositions. Sure there are better synths out there especially now compared to back then, but there are amazing sounds you can derive from that little black box that you cannot get anywhere else. It's like Adlib. There's better stuff out there, but sometimes you just want that certain sound. I still strongly believe that its Soundtrack patch is second to none.

I have a couple of my MT-32 tracks on my Soundcloud page. Check out Electronica and SQ2 Escape Countdown.

https://soundcloud.com/musiclyinspired

I've no great attachment to the Sound Canvas line, though (or Roland for that matter). I don't think any of them outdo modern plugins and synths. But again, they are unique and sound great. Music is all about uniqueness not about getting the best of the best. The best sounding guitars are usually ancient and incredibly worn.

Also, I may take you up on your challenge, just for the fun of it .

I can't read sheet music either. I don't believe it to be a requirement.

[Duke of Hazzard]

I just go with my ears. To me, the oggs in MusicallyInspired's SC-55 pack are the richest sounding MIDIs I've ever listened to. But I agree, uniqueness is a good thing when it comes to sounds. There are even people who like the crappy Sound Blasters because of their distinct sound.

[Mike Norvak]

I'd like install Win95 just to play this:

https://youtu.be/0mUqBX8F7GQ?t=3m20s

The nostalgia that game would give me if I play it again is beyond words...

[High Treason]

Kenw I forgot about something...

MusicallyInspired, on 04 May 2014 - 02:42 PM, said:

The buffer overflow and checksum errors are due to fast computers. Get a slow enough system (or slow down the cpu cycles in Dosbox) and the problem disappears. This problem was solved in 2nd generation MT-32s.

For me, this isn''t the case when even a 6MHz 286 can throw up these errors and given it struggles to run any games or sequencers that make use of the device I doubt that anything older would even be worth trying. I've come to the conclusion that the box simply doesn't like me and who can blame it when it's the only Roland device in a room full of Yamaha and Casio devices.

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And yes, I personally like it. Not only does it produce amazing results in game soundtracks that utilize its potential to the fullest (mostly Sierra adventure games), but I use it in my own personal compositions. Sure there are better synths out there especially now compared to back then, but there are amazing sounds you can derive from that little black box that you cannot get anywhere else. It's like Adlib. There's better stuff out there, but sometimes you just want that certain sound. I still strongly believe that its Soundtrack patch is second to none.

+1 for being constructive, a lot of people aren't these days. Just to add, I wouldn't pit it against a newer synthesizer as that simply wouldn't be fair.

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I have a couple of my MT-32 tracks on my Soundcloud page. Check out Electronica and SQ2 Escape Countdown.

https://soundcloud.com/musiclyinspired

That's pretty cool, though I smell external FX... That's not inherently a problem, it's just kinda cheating, but even I do that now; I used to think it was dishonest to use external effects or edit things on a piano roll but in the end everyone else does it so I figured what the hell. I need to set myself a soundcloud page up. As a last note, the same lag I complain about is there, every Roland I ever used does that. As for myself, I only ever completed a single track for the MT-32, it didn't use external effects, used stock patches as it didn't want anything to do with my attempts at programming it and the song had to be scaled back big time because of problems with the device, it actually broke down at the end where it starts dropping notes and the modulation and reverb are permanently stuck now making me think I did something the logic didn't like. Sucks because I wanted to sell it. I dunno, the MT-32 just doesn't produce the sounds I want no matter what I try, it just seems underpowered and watered down to me, it's like a digital synthesizer that tries to be analog and fails at both in my application.

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I've no great attachment to the Sound Canvas line, though (or Roland for that matter). I don't think any of them outdo modern plugins and synths. But again, they are unique and sound great. Music is all about uniqueness not about getting the best of the best. The best sounding guitars are usually ancient and incredibly worn.

I differ here, because I never use plugins if I can help it, it's the hardware or nothing for the most part. Nice to see you ain't one of these fanboys who hang around in the vintage synth communities, I used to know one personally, he was practically married to his System 100 and Jupiter 4 - he was also very easy to annoy if you criticized analog synthesis, Roland or Korg in front of him.

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Also, I may take you up on your challenge, just for the fun of it .

I can't read sheet music either. I don't believe it to be a requirement.

Let me know and I'll mediafire the files, don't expect the channel layout or markers to make much sense though. Yeah, well, I don't plan on learning sheet music any time soon.

[MusicallyInspired]

Here's how an MT-32 expert I know describes the errors:

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"Buffer Overflow" means the data arrives too fast for the MT-32 to handle. As stated previously, second generation units don't have this problem, as no data can arrive too fast for these models to handle. Reasons why this problem can occur:

the game programmer just didn't care
the game programmer only tested with a second/third generation model
the game programmer did insert the necessary delays, but timed them by counting CPU cycles.
Only in the last case will slowing down your system/DOSBox do any good.

"Checksum Error" is distinct from the "Buffer Overflow". It means that some data got lost before it arrived at the MT-32. This can happen because:

the game programmer counts CPU cycles to wait for the next available MIDI cycle (signaled by the MPU-401's "Data Receive Ready" bit) before sending a data byte. On fast computers, it finishes counting before the next MIDI cycle occurs, and so the game just gives up on sending that particular byte, thus losing it. Obviously, this is a different speed issue than the one causing the "Buffer Overflow".
the sound card/laptop/USB-to-MIDI's drivers don't handle large amounts of MIDI data properly and lose data. Update drivers.
the cables used are broken or not connected properly. Check connections and replace cables.
Only in the first case will slowing down your system/DOSBox do any good. Since you've said it doesn't, check the other reasons.

You gotta watch out for modern MIDI cables (especially the USB ones), if that's what you're using, as most of them aren't the best and have problems transmitting data to older synths like the MT-32. That might be where the problems lie sometimes. They don't make them like they used to.

There are no external effects in either of those MT-32 tracks at all. No cheating. It's all raw MT-32. The "delay" in the synth in Electornica (around 1:37) isn't actually delay but retriggered MIDI notes at lower velocities. It is a trick and a cheat, but only to give the illusion of delay.

The thing about the MT-32 is, unless you're very very skilled at programming in LA, you don't really go at the MT-32 to get the sound that's in your head. It's more like experimenting and discovering sounds. I have a library of custom programmed timbres that I found online. Literally hundreds. They're all fine examples of what can be done with it. And you can experiment with variations on top of those. The variations are plentiful. You can't get EVERYTHING you want (this IS an 80s box), but many of the sounds you DO get are nigh impossible to replicate elsewhere. And that's what makes it special. Its uniqueness. I'm still not sure what you mean by "lag", though.

Go ahead and send me the files via PM if you like.

Also, I'd love to hear some of your stuff. You should make that SoundCloud account. You get something like 2 hours of music with a free account. It's not bad.

[High Treason]

I don't use USB, don't even have USB MIDI cables. For whatever reason it didn't work for me, possibly faulty anyway I guess. I swear it lags, the other thing is how occasionally a chord will murder all previous notes due to the limited polyphony, it just handles that strangely and to me it sounds like the next note is always a little too late, the way it does it really never appealed to me for some reason - this is where I was going with it sounding underpowered. I should add that what the expert guy says makes sense to me, I guess Sierra's programmers suck, every MPU-401 / Compatible I have sucks or something else doesn't work properly for whatever reason when it can run everything else just fine.

Seems I am still not able to use the personal message system, I can't even find it and I was banned from it last time I went near it. It's not like I'm bothered about people getting their hands on my shoddily constructed stuff anyway, that video description openly invited other people to dismantle the song and mess around with it - albiet, mostly Jupiter users as they have a tendency to beat up on the Casio with hillarious results due to blind fanboyism and poorly constructed arguments - a bit like that System 100 guy I mentioned earlier, this used to happen a lot wherever I went a few years back, which is why I get defensive quickly.

It can be found on MediaFire; https://www.mediafir...5p62o7r6w6n511i

I stripped all the SysEx out (As that was Casio CZ specific anyway, mostly patch data) and corrected the channel layout. Markers aren't as bad as I remember them, I usually write really silly things on those. It'll be interesting to hear what you come up with, especially the Choir/Koto.

I wasn't aware the MT-32 was velocity sensitive, I guess it is. That isn't cheating, it's exploiting, you're supposed to do that and I've used that trick with the MU80/90 before when the internal FX unit has been under too much load to do it for me. That Casio song exploited the workings of the synth anyway, noteably one channel when heard in the recording was played with notes an octave apart yet in the MIDI/WRK you can see only one note at any time, basically when rendering it I used Tone Mix mode and selected the same patch twice, I then edited the patch to play one octave lower with different detune and vibrato parameters, this only affected the second instance of the patch as that data is stored in a different memory area, the original instance still played the unedited patch. It isn't how Casio intended the feature or patch memory to be used, but it works. Similarly the choir is two seperate sounds. As for patches, I use CZLib, that came with a lot of patches when I grabbed it years back, people claim editing for the Casio is hard work but you can copy any patch to any place in memory, most of what I use are edited from the presets or what came with that program though the occasional one is completely custom or that far from what it started out as I have no idea, just fun to press the buttons sometimes and see what happens.


Better watch out, I'm almost ready to throw some CZ-5000 stuff at the internet now, it's like that CZ-1000 but it takes steroids. As for soundcloud, I've started setting one up, it was something I meant to do for a while as there are a few things that don't end up in YouTube videos that I still wanted to upload at some point. No doubt I'll be spamming the page out for the next few days as I run through my unorganized folders trying to figure out what I did with things... Turns out one song was multitracked in Vegas with the video it appeared in and no FLAC ever existed., another had it's only existing copy hiding on my camera's SD card. As Duke would say; "Hehehe, whadda mess.".

[oasiz]

I see that combo of 486/P1 and ~P3 would be the most optimal.

Currently I have these:

P3 800MHz, 256MB SDRAM, Terratec EWS64XL for audio*, TNT2 & Voodoo2 combo for graphics.
*Has 32MB+2MB for soundfonts and uses ISA. works with pure DOS as well.

This runs almost anything I throw at it unless it's a really old game that needs less powerful hardware. Maybe a game or two has issues with this audio card as well.

For older games, I have a 133MHz laptop that has an audio chipset that is compatible with adlib/sb, 80MB of RAM and a trident graphics unit.
Pretty much everything from the early/mid 90s runs on this. Only improvement I can see is to have GUS for demoscene stuff in the laptop but it's a kinda small niche.


Generally compatibility is pretty good with hardware. I'd say that a retro system really depends on what kind of games you want to play. I needed the P3 just to play "No one lives forever" which is not really in the same tier as say.. Monkey island. There is no real "turnkey solution" when it comes to old stuff but you can get pretty close.