getting mac-style audio in scummvm

abstractism · Post by **abstractism** » Sat Oct 12, 2013 3:40 am

I was a mac gamer in the 90s and I don't have any macs anymore. is there any way I can play stuff like sam & max and have it sound like it did back then? it was a better sound than what the PC did for those times, wasn't it?

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:08 am

I've never heard what the Mac version of Sam & Max sounded like, but I was under the impression that the Mac and DOS use the exact same MIDI data for their music.

How this is played depends on your MIDI settings, which to some extent depend on what system you're running ScummVM on. The three major options, as I see it, is to play it through the system's MIDI driver (on Windows, this would probably be called "Windows MIDI"), through the AdLib emulator (which doesn't sound that good to me, probably because unlike earlier games Sam & Max didn't have music specifically written for AdLib), or through the FluidSynth MIDI emulator.

General MIDI defines a set of 128 instruments (piano, violin, flute, etc.) but doesn't say exactly what the instruments should sound like, so it's quite possible that the instruments Apple provided sounded different than the ones, say, Creative did.

Some MIDI drivers in ScummVM - I believe it's "CoreAudio" (Mac-only?), "Embedded Audio Synthesis" (Android-only?) and "FluidSynth" - allow you (or may even require you) to specify a SoundFont, and sometimes the operating system allows you to do that outside of ScummVM as well. Maybe it's possible to find one that sounds closer to an old Macintosh, but I don't know.

abstractism · Post by **abstractism** » Sat Oct 12, 2013 12:17 pm

hmm, maybe its because quicktime had a different instrument library, or maybe its because of whatever different audio hardware the old macs had? any other mac users out there with scummvm?

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Sat Oct 12, 2013 2:57 pm

The Mac sound for the SCUMM PPC binaries is not supported at this time. It was just a SCUMM-specific software driver based on some instrument samples that were packaged with the game. As eriktorbjorn said, it's the same MIDI data as the DOS version.

abstractism · Post by **abstractism** » Sat Oct 12, 2013 4:49 pm

clone2727 wrote:The Mac sound for the SCUMM PPC binaries is not supported at this time. It was just a SCUMM-specific software driver based on some instrument samples that were packaged with the game. As eriktorbjorn said, it's the same MIDI data as the DOS version.

so even if I have the mac version of the game files, it won't work like that?