Give me Music from Amiga and GFX from DOS

[unterschluepfli]

Hi

I have an idea for a new feature for future ScummVM-Versions:

Please make it possible to use the audio from an amiga-version and mix it with the graphics from a dos-version.
In my opinion the Amiga-Versions had the best music-quality. But the DOS-Versions had better graphics.
The most important game that could benefit from this feature may be indy4.

Perhaps a little tool that inserts the amiga-audio into the dos-gamedata to build a new, inofficial "deluxe-a-like-version" would be fine enough.

If you think my idea is too special, what else do you want to implement in future versions?

[PsYcO]

3a) Do not post bugreports here. See the FAQ answer on how to report bugs properly. The appropriate place for those is the Bug Tracker. Same goes for Feature Requests.

[clone2727]

PsYcO: You're wrong.

unterschluepfli: You cannot legally do that with games.

[DrMcCoy]

unterschluepfli: You cannot legally do that with games.

Also, that "little tool" wouldn't be little, but big, complex and damn hard to write.

[corpse]

This can be done with The secret of monkey Island cd version. This has come up in the forums before

http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php ... ight=amiga

[eriktorbjorn]

The most important game that could benefit from this feature may be indy4.

I thought I read somewhere that the Amiga version of Fate of Atlantis had less music than the DOS version. Or did I confuse it with some other game?

[Kaminari]

You're absolutely right, Erik. Not even mentioning the music is loop-based (no iMuse support AFAIR).

[Freddo]

This can be done with The secret of monkey Island cd version. This has come up in the forums before

http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php ... ight=amiga

That's different cause the CD version of Monkey Island just use normal CD tracks for the music. So all you have to do is to replace those tracks.

As I see it, I rather play the Amiga version of the SCUMM games before MI2, and the DOS version of MI2 and later.

[eriktorbjorn]

You're absolutely right, Erik. Not even mentioning the music is loop-based (no iMuse support AFAIR).

I assume this video shows the Amiga version. I have no desire to watch the entire thing, but to me much of that music sounds pretty mediocre, and not just because so many cues are missing. (Though it certainly doesn't help that it has to repeat the remaining cues, sometimes in absurdum.)

I guess whatever version of the music you hear first will be the one that sounds right, though.

[Ben Paddon]

I'm sure there's a way to ScummVM to interpret the audio from the Amiga versions if it had the data files handy. It's hardly "illegal" because it's not compiling a new version of the game, rather interpreting files from multiple versions. Reminiscence, a cross-platform interpretor for the DOS version of Flashback: The Quest for Identity, is able to do this, for instance - emulating the MS-DOS version of the game but substituting the Amiga music.

[Arantor]

If a player had both Amiga and PC versions of a game, legally, it might be theoretically possible to do, but (without wanting to sound like one of the developers) I believe the number of people that this would benefit would be very small, while the amount of time to develop, implement and test would be quite substantial, outweighing the actual benefits.

I personally think that would encourage people downloading whichever version they didn't have.

In any event, some of the older Amiga games had their music in TFMX format (notably Secret of Monkey Island), for which a player does not yet exist in ScummVM. I think I read somewhere that the TFMX format also had Amiga machine language in it, and thus you'd also need to implement a degree of Amiga emulation.

BTW, I can confirm the video link from eriktorbjorn is definitely Amiga FOA - you can tell by the limited number of colours cycling in the Indy logo, amongst other things. (Also if I remember rightly, when doing the seance scene with Trottier, the blouse Sophia wears is yellow in the Amiga version but purple in the PC version).

[Zaarin]

Sophia's blouse changes color in almost every scene. It's dark blue while she's giving the presentation and when you get to her ransacked office, the color changes to light blue.

Modding the PC version to use the Amiga music seems rather curious... It has both less music, and it sounds like the samples are 8 kHz, 8-bit recordings of the MT-32's samples anyway. Might as well buy an MT-32 on ebay. No programming needed, and the result is much better.

[rented mule]

The Mac version of many LucasArts games had, hands down, the best music. The Amiga had quite probably the worse music.

The Mac version of MI, MI2, Fate of Atlantis had a far greater range of instruments and sounds than any of the other platforms through the simple fact that the Mac version wasn't limited to a synthesizer's instrument set.

As result, playing the games with the Mac data files in ScummVM drives me bananas since ScummVM doesn't handle the music like the LucasArts Mac Scumm interpreter did back in the days. I'm forced to play them in a Mac emulator such as BasiliskII to get the authentic sound.

Listening to the CD tracks of these games, you can really tell the Mac version had the closest feel to what LucasArts had intended the game to sound like.

[LordHoto]

Listening to the CD tracks of these games, you can really tell the Mac version had the closest feel to what LucasArts had intended the game to sound like.

The videos of Monkey Island 1 CD sounded to me very much like the MT-32 sound honestly, but I have to admit I never heard the Mac version. So I guess MT-32 and Mac must be very similar for that specifc game?

Anyway I personally think that debate of "$(my_first_version) version sounds best" is pretty stupid, since everyone has different tastes and I bet there are people out there preferring PC Speaker even nowadays when playing those games again and I guess they would claim the music being "best" too.

[fingolfin]

The CD tracks are, AFAIK, recordings of an MT-32 anyway...