[grazulis]

A long time ago (1999, roughly), I got my copy of EQ, a couple of days after everyone else. To this day, some of my most vivid memories of that day revolve around the game's music. The uplifting tune when encountering the Gfay wizard spires. The mellow, nostalgic merchant music. The simple but appropriate desert music of Nro - which can now only be heard on Project 1999, incidentally.

I had the good fortune and luck to have a SB Awe32 in my pc at the time. Not only was the built-in soundbank quite a good one (for being so small), but the card also provided all-important reverb, without which ANY midi tune sounds hollow and dull.

As has been briefly touched upon in at least one other thread, you can hear EQ's old midi music, but you'll still have to have one of those old, discontinued soundcards available (in addition, it seems, to an older OS) if you want acceptable playback quality.

The reason for this is simple. Windows Vista / 7 both make use of a tiny (~3MB) GM wavetable synth soundbank when playing midi files. The poor quality of the soundbank is one of the culprits, but by far the biggest problem is the total absence of reverb.

As it happens, considerable hunting around has produced a solution to one of the problems. It is possible to replace the default soundbank with another. Easy in XP, not so much in Vista / 7. You have to find "gm.dls" in your windows directory structure (I know of two copies of said file in Windows 7) and replace them with an alternative DLS file.

Two problems. First, the DLS soundbank format is essentially unsupported, meaning you won't be finding good soundbanks on the net. At least I didn't. A solution is to acquire Awave Studio and use it to convert any of the plethora of SF2 soundbanks into the DLS level 1 format. Second problem is that in Vista / 7, the original gm.dls file is protected, and normally it is extremely tricky to make the file modifiable without somehow messing up your OS. Fortunately, research led me to a handy registry script which adds a file takeover option to your right-click menu (Google "take ownership"). Works like a charm.

Unfortunately, no matter how good a given soundbank is, without reverb, there's just something missing - something critical. Take EQ's gypsy music (can be heard in the grassy area of Nro). It's got a percussive element which sounds great with reverb, but otherwise sounds rather like somebody tapping two wooden pegs together.

Sadly, this is where my information hits a dead end, for now. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no way to force Windows' midi playback process to implement effects like reverb. However, there may be some means of rerouting midi playback through a yoke and into a standalone midi player which does the job properly (or, obviously, some kind of external midi device, if one wishes to go there). A big part of the point behind this post is to see if anyone's toyed around with this and perhaps already developed a solution.

Time is of the essence. To the best of my memory, in the entire classic/Kunark/SoV run, only classic exhibited a wide variety of music for various locations and situations. I think Kunark was 100% devoid of music, and SoV had maybe a tune at the ferrets or something. Soon enough, Project 1999 will be as musically bankrupt as EQ became. I hope to find a solution in time to enjoy the game more fully like I remember, and there are probably others who feel the same.

Side note: Classic EQ had three (midi) battle tunes, and picked one randomly when entering combat. Project 1999 plays the same tune every time. Does anyone know a fix for this?