The sound of pure nostalgia! My love affair with the Roland MT-32! But is it justified? 

You sir, are getting pinned! Thanks VERY much for the info!

@@TheRetroShack thanks! I love your channel btw. And oh, I meant to write MI and MI2 (for Monkey Island), not MK, sorry for the confusion!

@@michaelbricout6453 Thanks - I got it :) Glad you’re enjoying the channel :) :)

Yep same thing is available on Amiga AGA :)

I'd love to see an MK game made by Lucas Arts. 😋

Absolutely agree!

It was an option I never encountered myself, so was using the built-in music on Soundblaster cards for my DOS gaming days. Weirdly, that means that when I watch a RU-vid video of someone playing a game I remember with music going through an MT-32 it just sounds *wrong*, because to me it should be that ol' FM synthesis!

@@d2factotum yeah… FM is own thing. 😁

Yep - very clever project and wow! Those MT-32 sounds :) :)

I've got one too, currently playing Monkey island 2 using the 486SX core LoL

I'll be checking that out !

basically all origin games of that era, they were Mt32 masters!

Wow! Hope you got a good price for it - he was doing ok for himself even back in '97 :) :)

I’m finding myself increasingly more in need of a Mister… :)

@@TheRetroShack if you like Mt32 it’s a must have,there are lots of games that support Mt32 on the Ao486 checkout flynnsbit channel to have an idea..😊

Lol - I know us Tubers should talk more often :) the amount of times I’ve worked on a video and then a day or so before I’m ready to upload it, someone else does something really similar :) Looking forward to your take on it!

You’ve got better eyes than me :) Nice spot!

@@TheRetroShack Having an MT-32, an SC-55 and an SC-88 Pro on my own desk helps 😂

There’s nothing in the ‘held for review’ section so not sure what’s happening there - but a link to MI2 on the ST would be awesome!!

Hmmmm not sure - I'll have to have a go on some other machines and do some comparisons! :)

@@TheRetroShack I know it sounds slower than having the MT-32 play back on my 386. But the question becomes, is it running faster because of the 386, and the pace of the music on the AtariST is correct? Or is it for whatever reason, that the music is running slower on the AtariST? This is where you really get into a conundrum. And I don't have a lot of games on my AtariST that support MT-32, but I do have The Colonel's Bequest, which is another Sierra game, and the music does not play any slower than the music does on the PC. So that is where I wonder if I have been hearing the Quest for Glory 1 music at the wrong speed all of this time?

And are you still loving it? I think it has such a distinctive sound! :)

Surely nostalgia is by it's nature, entirely personal and based on your own experiences - if you never had one, you're not going to get nostalgic over one :) :) Personally, I loved mine :)

@@TheRetroShack Of course, there's nothing wrong with being nostalgic if you had one. I'm just curious why I hear so much about them now vs when they were new. I suppose people love to have what they could only drool over in the magazines when they were younger.

@@SanguineBrah Short Answer: Back in the day, the Roland MT-32 was super expensive. and the Roland SC-55 (for General MIDI) was even more so. Long Answer: When Roland MT-32's were new, back in the late 80's and early 90's, you'd expect to pay ~$600 USD for just the MT-32 module itself. Then you need a MIDI cable. If you were on pretty much anything OTHER than Atari ST, you'd also then need to buy a MIDI interface for your computer, such as the MPU-401 for PCs. In contrast, most computers of the era had built-in sound, such as the Commodores and Ataris of the age. For the PC you could purchase a SoundBlaster card for ~$100 or so. And remember, this is 80's and 90's dollar values. That was a TON of money back then and so most people found the SoundBlaster to be Good 'Nuff. Today you will find a lot of interest in those old MIDI synths because now hearing old games as they were meant to be heard is a lot more affordable than it used to be. Even with the prices of MT-32 on eBay, you're still paying only a fraction of the $$$ these devices cost new.

I personally like it's lofi sounding percussions and it also has usable tuned percussion instruments and it's brass sounds have that 80s sound to it. I actually have the CM-32L which is basically a lower cost version of the MT-32 and I bought it as part of a loblot with the CM-32P which was another beige box which serves as an addon for the CM-32L adding 64 high quality PCM istruments from the U-110 covering all the important sounds such as pianos, e pianos, organs, guitars, basses, brass and saxophones plug it also has a slot for a PCM card, I also have a Roland U-220. I basically bought the CM-32s instead of a Roland D-110 and U-110

Yep! I was indeed :) Trouble is, I didn't notice and the sound still came out of course :) I've switched it since :)

That’s one for the community to answer I think! Above my level of knowledge - I’m a consumer of MIDI only :) :)

Not really. The SC-55 and SC-88 (and Pro) came with a patch map that remapped them to the same instruments as the MT-32, but it wasn't a perfect match. Also, those later modules used just regular sound samples, unlike the MT-32 which used LA synthesis allowing for some techniques that aren't possible with PCM wavetable as is. Also (and this is the biggest obstacle) the newer modules don't understand the MT-32 sysex data, they don't even listen for the appropriate device ID and simply discard what they don't recognise. This meant that the SC-55 "emulation" of the MT-32 sounds okay (just "okay", not "great" or even "good") only if the music being played just makes use of the default instruments and has no additional effects. That leaves very few games sounding good. Of the ones I've tried, I think Monkey Island 1 comes pretty close to the MT-32 when using the SC-55's MT-32 patch map, but most Sierra games sounds awful that way.

I doubt it :) Otherwise how would I know when to insert a Buckazoid? :) :)

Unfortunately not yet :(. I might end up designing one myself - could be a fun project :)

It doesn’t combine the different sources, you’d need to mix it yourself - 90’s styleeee!

@@TheRetroShack Totally 😅 I must say that's one thing I don't miss about the 90s (or earlier), is having gear sitting round and a giant noodle bowl of cables and connections to make it work. I mean you can still do it today, but so many things I use are just now one box and a couple of cables, which actually suits me fine 🙂 Thanks for the reply! I can now get on with sorting out how to make this work in my system.

You can *always* give them away ;) ;) Be happy to add them to the collection!

@@TheRetroShack I'm sure you would. I've often thought of putting them up for sale, and even though they haven't been turned on in many years I just can't bare to part with them.

In a way I'm glad I moved away from the Amiga before I really noticed it's decline. By the time I got back into Amiga's they were expected to be slow :)

Well, the PC version of Syndicate ran at 640x480 while the Amiga version was stuck at 320x200, not surprising the PC version was better! I was amazed at those high resolution graphics back in the day.

@@TheRetroShack i got the A1200 after the A500 and it was a brilliant machine, had it until 94 then moved over to the pc and i have to admit i was mightily disappointed, pre-windows 95, dos 6.2 & win 3.11 was so inferior to workbench. thankfully it was only 6 months then win 95 came out, which i remember buying from my local HMV for £75. the amiga was so far ahead of it's time.

​@@bazza5699 I find it ridiculous that people make statements like this! "Hey I'm going to compare a 5+ year newer system that cost much more that the A500 that was always priced to be an entry level system. I never bother spending any money upgrading the Amiga with CPU's or video cards or sound cards or anything else that PC owners basically had to just to keep up. But I'm going to say it was the Amigas fault! not that I couldn't buy upgraded Amigas with all these things that may have then invigorated the market to make software that would then take advantage" In 92 I got my A1200. Quickly upgraded it with faster CPU's, memory, storage, multisync monitor. Made a lot of money with that system, annoyed a number of Mac users by blowing away their preconceived notion of what made them superior by running their software along side the Amiga, faster then they could (yep, that's what real preemptive multitasking allowed). Ran PC software and a number of other systems so by all accounting I had access to the largest software library in the world across multiple platforms. Yep the Amiga was definitely so far behind!!! In 95 I spent thousands buying a PC that I felt was worth replacing my Amiga with after the bankruptcy and even then it was not living up to my old Amiga in reliability or usability. it wasn't until 1999-2000 before I had a PC that eclipsed the Amiga It cost in excess of $10,000 and was by al accounts a cutting edge system running Windows 2000. Today Deathloop locked-up on me taking with it the file manager, requiring a hard reboot. It's not like my system is some POS. I run a lean Win 10 system, with consistently cleaned up startup programs, 32GB RAM, 8 Core CPU, 4.5 GHz hell my video card alone cost over $2000 it's a system capable of amazing things. Yet even after all these years I'm disappointed with the lack of progression.

That will be Wing Commander :)

@@TheRetroShack i was literally dozing off when i asked that, sorry. : ) i meant at 1:48 and 3:58

@@bamdadkhan That will be Strike Commander :)

@@TheRetroShack awesome cheers < 3

Yep, should have gone with "Shiver me timbers!" :)

Thanks :) I’m on the mend now :)

Thanks - me either till my rabbit hole trip :)

You’re welcome! :)

Still looks good today! ( And sounds great too :) )

I guess that's just an era that I missed as I transition from unwashed youth to reasonably sensible adult - you know that five years or so :)