Ultima 6 Music

[Guru Dragon]

I'm trying to play the music of Ultima 6 with my Roland MT-32. However, the only way I've found to play the *.M files is through AdPlug. Unfortunatly, AdPlug doesn't support playing music through my USB MIDI device, thus no Roland MT-32 quality.

I checked the source of AdPlug (http://adplug.cvs.sourceforge.net/adplu ... iew=markup) and it appears that the *.M files are encoded using LZW compression.

I don't know enough C programming to read the code properly. Does anyone know if the *.M files can be extracted into a format that I could play through a MIDI device. Any of the MIDI formats that Winamp supports will do.

I want to get the exact sound from the game, but every Ultima 6 MIDI collection I've downloaded sounds wrong, they are all converted to General MIDI.

Can anyone help me?

Thank you.

[Colourless]

Ultima 6's music was designed to be played via an Adlib sound card. MT32 support was added 'late' and converted the Adlib music to use MT32 instruments and output the notes to the MT32 using something that can be described as a hack.

Strictly speaking, the music played via an Adlib (or AdPlug) is how it's supposed to sound.

[Guru Dragon]

I assume from your usage of the word "hack" that there is no simple way to convert the Ultima 6 Adlib music into any MIDI flavor (MID, XMI, RMI, etc.).

Even though the Adlib was the dominant soundcard of the time I would still prefer to record from the MT-32 in order to get the highest quality of sound that the game had to offer.

I'm trying to add some more Ultima music to my videogame music project (www.thealmightyguru.com/VGMPF)

[weirwood]

This might or might not be helpful: a couple of years ago I found the Ultima 6 roland music as mp3s on someone's webpage.

I just checked it, and it appears to still be online:

http://dor-lomin.com/archive/ultima/mus ... index.html

[Guru Dragon]

Thank you for the link, but it's not the MP3s that I want. Although his MP3's are really nice to listen to, because they're encoded in a lossy codec and impossible to reproduce they aren't much use to me.

What I'm looking for is a way to record them myself using my own Roland, so I need them in a MIDI-like format.

[artaxerxes]

I'm also quite a fan of Tom Grandgent's work that you can find at: http://www.grandgent.com/tom/ultima/