A discussion on restoring EQ's music once and for all

[doacleric]

Originally Posted by TheBlackSheep [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I had a SB PCI128 card. I don't recall ever having a sound problem.

Az

Thanks but that doesn't help. EQ back in the day did 1 of 2 things when playing music.

1.) If you have an AWE64 and I think a Live!, it would activate the special soundfont files, upload it into the soundfont bank RAM on the soundcard, and use that for music play back, along with any special effects such as reverb and what not. This is what we are trying to recreate

2.) If you had ANY other soundcard besides those 2, it would instead load a software based DLS soundbank, and use that to playback the music. This would bypass the MPU-401 native playback abilities of the soundcard, and use a 100% software solution to play the music. This soundbank sounded significanty inferior, in addition to using up a lot of CPU time, causing the music to skip for a lot of people on slower systems. This is what most people ended up hearing back in the day.

Back around the release of Luclin and the DX8 upgrade, both of these systems were dropped, and MIDI playback was simply deferred to whatever wavetable synthesis was available to your soundcard. This can sound decent depending on the wavetable quality of your soundcard, but still sounds inferior to what the music sounded like on a real Soundblaster AWE64 back in the day.