Edited for clarification.

Hi all. I'm making a list of PC DOS games with Sound Blaster support that feature sample-based music (such as Jazz Jackrabbit) when using such a card, as opposed to FM music (Adlib) and sampled SFX or speech, or FM music mixed with samples (such as Zone 66), or CD audio. This includes midi music, mod music, and streaming wav files (or variants).

The purpose is to find out the best examples of such music in PC games and make a guide of sorts so that they are easy to find. Any examples (an audio or video link would be great) you can think of are appreciated, the more obscure the better.

I am NOT interested in MT-32, or midi music using other cards/devices. I AM interested in unofficial AWE32/64 midi music (where the AWE32 interprets OPL or MT-32 music for example), as long as it's not glitchy.

Related question: What was the best you could do with an AWE32 or 64 card back in ~1997 and back, in terms of expansions and soundfonts? Does limiting the OS to DOS or Win 3.1 change the answer a lot?

Mobygames lists of Sound Blaster supported games:
http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/shee ... Id,40/p,2/
http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/shee ... buteId,17/

This SB list will be a part of a bigger project, compiling the most impressive music made for retro (up to 32-bit gen for now with a couple of exceptions) sound devices: http://minirevver.weebly.com/impressive ... -chip.html

Edit:
Latest updated list of sample-based SB music supporting games is here:
http://minirevver.weebly.com/sound-blaster-pcm-music.html

Do you want MIDI music or non-MIDI?

Basically, you're looking for Roland MT-32 / General MIDI supported games, right ?
Look here for a start.


These lists ([url=http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Category:Games_That_Use_LAPC-I_For_Music]here[/url] and [url=http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Category:Games_That_Use_MT-32_For_Music]here[/url]) are faaaaar from complete, but it is still better than nothing.

I thought all Sound Blaster music was some kind of midi (or pre-general midi standard) or tracker music? A lot of FM synth soundtracks sound like midi music with default instrument settings for whatever standard was used rather than the music being tweaked for OPL2 or OPL3 specifically, which is also why a lot of them sound kinda bad.

I don't mean MT-32, I know there are lists and I have been compiling one for the most impressive MT-32 OSTs myself lately, which you can find here: http://minirevver.weebly.com/mt-32-music.html. I'd like to do one for SB sample-based music at some point.

General Midi is not the same from what I understand, it can use several different cards or modules like SC55, GUS, Yamaha MU80 etc.

So you mean MOD-style music for Sound Blaster cards up to the SB16 ?

If I'm not wrong, Sound Blasters (except from the SB32 / SBAWE32) had 2 chips : one for midi music which used FM synthesis which sounded crappy most of the time and one for other sounds, which a few games with MOD-type musics sounded better.

Pinball Fantasies (and maybe other pinballs from Digital Illusions) had such music I believe. That's the only example right now that comes to my mind. (Not much help, I know...)

I think so, yeah. I've read that the SB cards (up to a point?) had a single sample channel, at first just 8-bit and mono, then stereo came with the SB Pro, and 16-bit samples with the SB16 while sample rates improved gradually with each revision. I guess it can be split into several channels in software if later cards didn't add more.

Thanks, that's just what I'm looking for. It sounds very good with the AWE32 in this comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cps8VyuZosA

Someone linked me to a pretty good tracker music list:
https://www.giantbomb.com/tracker-music/3015-7338/games/

I think I've sorted out all the PC DOS games from the above. With some more research online here's the current list (tracker/mod variants+midi music), roughly in order of sound design quality:
Crusader: No Regret
Crusader: No Remorse
Death Rally
Epic Pinball (SB)
Hi-Octane (SB)
Jazz Jackrabbit (SB)
Piranha
Warcraft II (SB)
Pinball Fantasies (PC, SB)
System Shock (SB)

One Must Fall 2097 (SB) - find hq
Mystic Towers
Secret of Monkey Island (SB AWE32, 32MB RAM. Apparently uses a custom soundfont) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh0QIFQwKPc&t=10m55s
Doom (SB AWE32, 32MB)
Tyrian (SB)
Terminal Velocity
Axia
TIE Fighter (SB AWE32)
Monkey Island 2 (SB)
Rise of the Triad (SB)

Curse of Monkey Island/Monkey Island 3 (SB)
Descent (SB, AWE64 Gold)
Hexen (SB)
Turrican II (SB) - find stereo?
Settlers II (SB)
Alien Carnage
Gabriel Knight: SotF (SB)
Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (SB)
Descent II (SB AWE32)
Doom II (SB)

Pinball Dreams 2 (SB)
Phantasmagoria (SB AWE32)
Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (SB AWE32)
Aladdin (PC, SB)
Star Wars: Dark Forces (SB)
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (SB)
Duke Nukem 3D (SB AWE32)
Warcraft (SB)
Bedlam 2 (SB)
Heretic (SB)

Bedlam (SB)
Star Control II (SB)
Interpose
The Terminator: Future Shock (SB)
LineWars II (SB)
Sonic & Knuckles Collection (PC, SB AWE32)
Legend of Kyrandia (SB)
Leyendas de Lhodrye: Arakhas el Oscuro, Screamer (SB)
Street Fighter II Turbo (SB AWE32)
Leyendas de Lhodrye: La Luz del Druida
Blast Chamber (PC, SB)
Manchester United: The Double (PC)
Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance (SB)
Seek and Destroy (SB)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (SB)
Z (SB, cutscenes)
Mega Man X (PC, SB)

Aren't most of the titles in this list (at least those with the SB next to them), games with MIDI music rather than tracker-style music ?
For example, Monkey Island 2 has only MIDI music I think. So playing it with a SB would output FM synthesis only.

EDIT : maybe does it work differently on the Amiga, but since you said you were interested in PC DOS games only...

Yes, well some of them are. I didn't put AWE32 in parenthesis for some where perhaps I should've, as all this is pretty new to me. But doesn't AWE32/64 have a unique sound with midi music still? I thought it changed depending on what device or soundfont you use. Someone on YT also said that mod (and variant) music sounds the same on any card. I dunno about that, as the sample rate and depth should at least be different for older SB cars, not to mention it will be in mono if you go far enough back (if it even works).

Here's where I got the Monkey Island example from, AWE32 (and 32MB ram expansion?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh0QIFQwKPc&t=10m55s

Edit:
I've also learned that SB midi music draws from the same bank of instruments, except for a few games that used custom instruments. Games with custom SB AWE32/64 instruments:
Battle Arena Toshinden - can't find
Dungeon Keeper (ambient sfx as part of the music)
Eradicator - find music rip
Hi-Octane
Magic Carpet 2 - can't find
Nerves of Steel - can't find
Perfect General II - can't find
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri - find music rip

Edit 2:
This LGR upload seems to show off Monkey Island on AWE32 more accurately, not quite as good but still pretty nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y&t=2m11s

Yet another different sounding Monkey Island, on AWE64:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZXcl3ZwrPM

And one more still, AWE32 in GM mode. This one sounds quite close to LGR's upload, except for a couple of instruments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfZOiM2pvg4

Anyone know what Blood (1997) uses for its midi soundtrack here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L928CmhAPQY

If I'm not mistaken (all of this is quite blurry to me now since it's old), the Wave Blaster / SB32 / AWE32 / AWE64 allowed any MIDI music to be played with the built-in soundfont, or with another soundfont stored on the onboard RAM (if you had any).
So ANY game with MIDI music which would be FM synthesis on a SB16 for example, can be "changed" to better sounding samples-MIDI music with the cards mentioned above.
That's how the recordings of MI2 you posted above were made.

But the samples in question are included on the sound card, not the game. It is still MIDI music.

Whereas on tracker music (mod, s3m, it, xm, ...), the samples are included in the file being played. So it is slightly different.

Many games in the list you posted above do not include tracker music I believe, only MIDI. But with the later SB cards (WB, 32, AWE32, AWE64), it sounds like it because it is no longer FM synthesis. But it is not tracker music, just MIDI.


EDIT : here is a link with a few helpful resources. There is a brief history of MIDI music and soundcards (it briefly talks about tracker music) and a few comparisons.

Regarding the first paragraph, could you easily do that with a lot of games back in the day? Have older Adlib/MT-32 games use AWE32 midi I mean. I've seen a handful of uploads that use later soundfonts or sometimes enhancements that aren't even explained, so perhaps not what I'm looking for as I want to make a fairly authentic to the time list here.

Yeah I know. I am looking for both, just sample-based music for PC DOS games using Sound Blaster cards (up until AWE64 seems like a good cutoff point).

What I am on the fence about is what seems to be large wav (or compressed variants) files playing during intros, often in mono. Because it is more akin to wav files on a CD, such as in C&C1.

Having looked through just one year of games now, 1997, using mobygames (which included a bunch of earlier releases as re-releases though) and YT, I have these lists of games that I need to look into more as I'm unsure of what is being used or can be used.

Find AWE32/64 Midi (games that had Adlib "midi", MT-32 or GM on YT): Heroes of Might and Magic II, Capitalism, Dawn Patrol 1994, Death Gate 1994, Dragonsphere 1994, Empire Soccer 94, Gloriana: Elisabeth I, The Great War/History Line: 1914-1918, Gunship 2000, Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II (SB in cutscenes), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games, JetFighter III (SB in cutscenes), Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos, Lords of the Realm, Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure, Nick Faldo's Championship Golf, Normality, Panzer General, The Patrician, Pizza Tycoon, Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny, Realms of Arkania II: Star Trail, Red Baron, Return to Zork, Reunion - find hq, Rex Blade: The Apocalypse, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, Shannara, Sid Meier's Civilization, Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, Sim Farm, Space Quest 6, Spirou, Theme Hospital, Theme Park, Tintin in Tibet, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Whiplash/Fatal Racing, Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, Wrath of Earth, Yendorian Tales: The Tyrants of Thaine, Zombieville, Zone Raiders,

CD audio only?: Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Price of Loyalty, Darklight Conflict, EWJ1-2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Norse by Norse West: The Return of the Lost Vikings, Fantasy General, Pro Pinball: Timeshock!, Quake (SB ambient sfx), Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, King's Quest 6, Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles, Steel Panthers III: Brigade Command (SB intro), Test Drive: Off-Road, Little Big Adventure 2/Twinsen's Odyssey, Wargame Construction Set III: Age of Rifles 1846-1905, World of Aden: Thunderscape,

CD audio?: XS - partial SB?, X-Men: Children of the Atom, X-COM: Apocalypse, Wing Nuts: Battle in the Sky, Wetlands, Waterworld, Versailles 1685, Time Warriors, Thunder Truck Rally, Tailchaser, Street Racer, Star Command: Revolution, Screamer Rally, Realms of the Haunting, Hyper 3-D Pinball, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, NHL 96, NHL 97, The Need for Speed: Special Edition, NASCAR Racing (SB intro), Master of Orion, Malice: 23rd Century Ultraconversion for Quake, The Last Express, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny, KKND: Krush Kill 'N Destroy, Judge Dredd, Jane's Combat Simulations: AH-64D Longbow & Gold ver., Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft, In Pursuit of Greed, Ignition, Great Naval Battles Vol. IV, Grand Theft Auto, Fragile Allegiance, Capitalism Plus, Championship Manager: Season 97/98, Chasm: The Rift, The City of Lost Children, Conquest Earth: "First Encounter", Destruction Derby 2, Die Fugger II, Discworld II: Mortality Bytes!, Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins (sb intro), Duke Caribbean: Life's A Beach, Earth 2140, Extreme Assault

I'll try to clear things up a bit. Some things you guys got right, some things seem to still cause some confusion here. These are basically the kinds of music from the DOS age:

AdLib / FM Synthesis
Contrary to popular belief this is NOT MIDI music. Ad Lib was one of the first manufacturers to introduce a de facto standard in PC sound cards. The Ad Lib cards were only capable of FM Synthesis, not playing back any samples. That's that buzzing and white noise sound that most people remember from back in the day, especially because when Creative came around with the Soundblaster and introduced support for playing back samples on PC they also included an Ab Lib clone on their cards. So early in the early 90's the most common combo was sampled SFX + FM synthesized music on a Soundblaster card.

Roland MT-32
This was not as much a sound card as it was a synthesizer that could communicate with PCs via the MIDI interface. However, this was NOT a General MIDI compliant card. This was a unique piece of hardware with unique capabilities and sound which was simply fed instructions via MIDI. The Roland MT-32 was not capable of playing back samples but with some effort it could create all sorts of sounds because it was a really powerful synthesizer. The MT-32 was briefly a de facto standard because developers like Sierra, LucasArts and Origin tried to establish it as such before samples or sound cards with soundbanks were a thing. However, as I said, it's a highly custom and device and that's why a game needs to contain compositions specifically made for this soundcard. Additionally it was very expensive so when the Sound Blaster and General MIDI came around this was pretty much abandoned.

General MIDI
General MIDI is just a standard that eventually most MIDI devices adhered to. It was standardised what which instructions should do, most notably 128 instruments were established. The first couple of instruments were pianos, later you had organs, percussion, guitars etc. The General MIDI soundtrack didn't standardise the sound, just when which instruments should play. So a card based on synthesis might synthesise a piano or something while other cards would each play their own sample from a soundbank on a ROM on the soundcard itself for said piano or could even play an individual sample for each note. And the Gravis Ultrasound was remarkable in that it was the only somewhat popular soundcard that could play custom samples for General MIDI music but did not play them from a ROM but rather RAM on the soundcard which means that theoretically games could load unique sounds onto the card (although few games did that and it was always necessary to run a program that would load the sounds onto the soundcard's RAM before it could play any music). Anyway, what matters is that developers only had to support General MIDI, include only compositions based on this one standard, to support hundreds of devices by different manufacturers that used a variety of methods to actually play back the music. The actual sound that the user would hear DID differ from device to device, however.

Tracker music
This is what this thread is about. This is a concept probably primarily popularised by the Amiga 500 which could play back samples but had limited memory. So developers would include files that contain both the compositions AND the actual samples. The result was small but high quality music that, probably most importantly, did always sound exactly the way the composer had envisioned it. The concept never quite took off on PC where first Ad Lib's FM Synthesis, then General MIDI, then CD Audio and finally compressed audio formats like MP3 or OGG were favoured. However, as OP is aware, there exist quite a few PC games that DO use tracker formats. It's worth nothing that while there exist a few standard formats like MOD some composers would create their very own unique formats, the games just had to know how to decode them. Tracker music can be found in some earlier PC games like Pinball Dreams (which unsurprisingly originated on Amiga) but also pretty late ones like Gothic and Unreal or Deus Ex.

I'll skip PC speaker sound and CD Audio but it's worth mentioning that the occasional game DID just use audio files like WAV for the music (one example being Return Fire). Due to memory constraints this would generally sound like crap, though, until good compression like MP3 or OGG became a thing.

I know that I've repeated a number of things here that you guys already knew but I thought it was still a good idea to clear things up a bit, also for others who may want to contribute but don't really know what this is really about.

And yes, I'm aware that I oversimplified a few things and people who are even more passionate about this stuff and particularly the history of all these kinds of hardware may cringe at some of the details but I think it's still a decent description of the big picture.

I mean, I think the OP is pretty clear now (tbf it wasn't a couple of days ago). It's about all sample-based music on Sound Blaster cards, including midi.
I just didn't consider the wav files which I assume sound the same on other brands of cards. No, it's not an introduction thread for people who don't know anything about sound cards at all but it wasn't meant to be.

I know the basics of the Adlib and later Adlib (OPL2 & 3) supporting cards, but what my memory's fuzzy about is why they tended to sound like someone took a midi, assigned stock (?) FM instruments to it and called it a day. I'm also interested in info on how easy it was to use AWE32 (or GUS for example) to play back older music intended for Adlib or MT-32, since as I've linked to there are examples of that (Monkey Island).

Not quite right; "Like the Roland D-50 Linear Synthesizer, it uses Linear Arithmetic synthesis, a form of sample-based synthesis combined with subtractive synthesis, to produce its sounds. Samples are used for attacks and drums, while traditional synthesis assures the sustain phase of the sounds. "
It was also not abandoned that quickly; several later games sound the best on MT-32 and it was used on other platforms as well such as the Sharp X68000. Linking to my tribute page again: http://minirevver.weebly.com/mt-32-music.html

Yes, but there were also a few custom instrument OSTs for AWE32/64 as I think I mentioned earlier in the thread.