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

[ribaldron]

IMO UO and EQ had FANTASTIC music - I mean, it doesn't have shit on what we could have today with our fancy MP3's and whatnot - but they did the best they could with what technology they and their customers had, and it sounds *terrible* today.

I remember these being totally awe-inspiring back in the day - UO was the same story - I could not play UO with the terrible new MP3's and had to replace them all, heheh. At least with EQ we have poor-sounding high quality music. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]


Would be awesome if someone finds a solution to this. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[doacleric]

Originally Posted by km2783 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Small world hehe. So EQ did come with it's own SoundFont for use in compatible sound cards like the AWE32 and others. So the OP probably needs THAT SoundFont and not the default AWE32 one?

Its tricky, and i'm not 100% sure how the internal workings were handled. The soundblaster came with its own soundfont, yes. EQ also came with its own 512k soundfont file, which was uploaded into the soundcard upon loading the game. What i'm NOT sure about is if EQ used its own soundfont instruments exclusively, or a mixture of the two.

[km2783]

Can the card use a mixture of the two? I'm not sure I've read either way on that one.

I did find that they used the Miles Sound System and that Miles only somewhat recently removed the free player for their xmi files =/ it was called MilesT32.exe and I have yet to find it.

[mgellan]

Originally Posted by km2783 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We might have to rely on Mg and his AWE64 for the most accurate results.

Almost done loading Win98 on it, LOL, man a P166 is sloooooooooooow.

Regards,
Mg

[km2783]

LOL go, man, go!

[rikustrength]

I would LOVE to see this come to fruition. At first I read it and I thought "no way do I want my eq tunes sounding different at ALL", but just a few seconds of that kelethin music got me going [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] I would LOVE to hear that in my game. Y_Y

[FatMagic]

@km2783 - that Kelethin track sounds excellent! Get all the tracks out like that [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

@mg - hahaha can't wait to hear what you can do with that "beast" !

@ribaldron - I found an archive of UO's music done with the best MIDI synthesizer available when UO released. So this is the best it would have sounded in 1997, and they all sound fantastic! Listen to "Creation" & "Stones" for two of the most reminiscent tunes. http://www.dor-lomin.com/archive/ult...sicarchive/uo/

[Gamkek]

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

Almost done loading Win98 on it, LOL, man a P166 is sloooooooooooow.

Regards,
Mg

Man, this is exciting! Carry on, brother.

Makes me kick myself for all the times I tossed out or gave away old hardware thinking, "There's no way I'll ever use this again..." [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[doacleric]

Just FYI, there is going to be no way to get that HQ sounding SB AWE music playing in place of the current music ingame. That functionality is no longer there in the EQ client. The best we can do is record MP3's of an old client playing the music on an old computer with an AWE installed. Note that you will need to somehow get a VERY old version of the emu working with the old client to even get into the world. Doable, but tricky.

[rikustrength]

Just FYI, there is going to be no way to get that HQ sounding SB AWE music playing in place of the current music ingame. That functionality is no longer there in the EQ client. The best we can do is record MP3's of an old client playing the music on an old computer with an AWE installed. Note that you will need to somehow get a VERY old version of the emu working with the old client to even get into the world. Doable, but tricky.

Well, we already have a lot of the HQ sounding music in mp3 format, isn't it also a problem of getting the p99 client to read mp3s since currently most of those songs are in .xmi format? We can't just swap out the xmi files for the mp3s since they have different extensions and won't be recognized unless the client is told to look for files with a different extension.

I do NOT know in the slightest how all this works, I'm not a programmer and I barely follow what you guys are going on about, but it was my understanding that as much as getting EQ to play the xmi properly in the first place is a problem, so is just telling it to play something other than xmi. Correct me if I'm wrong? :/ I really would love to have this music in my game instead of the regular.