On resource-constrained computers (or certain SF2 compatible hardware synthesizers), this isn't ideal.
Timbres Of Heaven is also ~376MB in size, which must be loaded into RAM to utilize. This gives me the impression it was intended more for studio use than for gaming or other standard GM playback. Also, tremolo has been added to certain instruments in a manner which was not in any MIDI standard I'm aware of, and often clashes badly with many real-world examples (such as the soundtracks to many Sierra games) where the composer would have added their own tremolo in the MIDI itself.
Some of the volumes between instrument presets are highly inconsistent, resulting in an uneven and often overpowering sound. Timbres Of Heaven, while an overall great sounding SoundFont, is unfortunately NOT very adherent to the General MIDI convention.
Suffice it to say, there are plenty of tutorials online and these forums in particular describing how to load a SF2 in various situations, and I'm happy to help if you still have questions. This depends largely on whether a particular game is being loaded through your OS, hardware synth, ScummVM, DOSBox, etc. Imagine my surprise when I couldn't find one I liked as well as my old UHD SF2. Especially if you're an audiophile like me.īasically, I was going to play an old school game and went looking for the cool new SoundFonts to make the MIDI not suck. It follows that your choice of SoundFont can have a noticeable impact on your classic video game experience. To put it simply, a SoundFont is a library of instrumental sound samples, instructions and parameters which, when loaded by a compatible synthesizer (either implemented in hardware or in software), will dramatically change the sound of MIDI output. MIDI doesn't have any sound information in it per se, therefore the quality of the samples utilized by your MIDI synthesizer determines the quality of your MIDI sound as much as the composition itself. The digital equivalent of sheet music, MIDI was commonly utilized by the video games of yesterday. I also got a Sound Blaster 2.0, however it's faulty :-( So will need to wait a bit more before I can test these Chips.TL DR: After sitting on it for something like a decade and a half, I'm releasing my General MIDI SoundFont to the public. However the Sound Blaster 2.0 (The final mono Sound Blaster which is shorter and newer) needs a third chip which is from Creative. Well for Soundblaster 1.5 they are basically 2 Philips Sound chips and yes easy to find. But hang on! CMS chips are easy to find you say.
This is the Creative Labs CMS upgrade kit. Though the Midiman MM401 does the job just fine, so this card will be tucked away in case I break the other one. Oh well now I know what it soundsĭoom sounds ok, Doom 2 E1M1 *shudder* that big fat loud drum got replaced by some other tone I can't even describe. The card isn't really Sound Blaster compatible and the MIDI sounds worse than on a Roland Sound Canvas. No wonder it struggled against Sound Blaster. What a hassle to get this card going LOL. I googled for ages and finally found SETRAM.EXE. Googling for ages it turns out the PnP came with a CD and on the CD a utility which made the PnP compatible to the classic GUS. However I still only got Sound FX in Doom. Then I reconfigured it to 5,5,1,1 as this is what DOSBox uses and it works. I also got 2 memory modules (1MB) because otherwise this card is pretty useless as far as playing DOS games with GUS support.