Playing oldgame in Dosbox, is sound blaster or Roland better

audio-hardwaredosboxmaddog-williams

I'm playing an old game in Dosbox. The game asks me whether my sound card is Sound Blaster or Roland. What should I choose for best sound?

enter image description here

Game happens to be http://www.gamecrafters.com/gamecrafters/maddog/index.html if you're curious.

Best Answer

Audio quality is somewhat subjective, although it's my opinion that the Roland MT-32 produced superior music quality. You can compare them with a number of videos on YouTube. Here's one for Space Quest 3:

Sound Blaster:

Roland MT-32:

The Roland audio offers a bit better quality, has reverb effects, actual MIDI "instruments," is in stereo, etc.

DOSBox, however, doesn't emulate the Roland MT-32. It only passes MIDI data to whatever MIDI devices are available on your PC. This might be the actual Roland hardware, although that's unlikely in this day and age. However, most modern sound cards have rudimentary support for MIDI, but the quality depends on your card, its drivers, etc. There are a few 3rd party MIDI device emulators for DOSBox - there's a good article on their wiki about setting them up.

So, to summarize, you'll probably get a better quality out of the MT-32 option, but only if you take the time to set it up and configure DOSBox/your PC properly.

Related Topic