Munt

Munt: The Roland MT-32 Emulator

The MUNT QT App loading The The Colonel's Bequest

Introduction

A Roland MT-32 Sound Module loading Space Quest III

The Roland MT-32 Sound Module

Starting with King's Quest IV, Sierra On-Line introduced their new engine, SCI to replace their older engine, AGI. At the time, SCI was cutting edge. It could take advantage of the newer PCs' better EGA graphics and new audio capabilities. Rather than just the internal PC speaker, SCI supported hardware such as The AdLib, Game Blaster and most importantly, the Roland MT-32 Sound Module.

The MT-32 was an external module that could be hooked up to a PC's MPU-401 [w:MIDI|MIDI]] card. While many may have fond memories of the AdLib's unique sound, it is the Roland tracks that really shined. Most of the early SCI (SCI0) to some of the first SCI1 games had fantastic MT-32 sound tracks. This lead to some of the most memorable game music.

While is is still possible to get a real MT-32 on places like eBay, some may not want to shell out the $100 plus that it often takes to obtain one. Note that DOSBox works great with an MT-32 hooked up to a modern PC.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2055119.m570.l1313.TR2.TRC1.A0.H0.XRoland+MT-32&_nkw=Roland+MT-32&_sacat=0&_from=R40

Munt

Some of you might be aware of efforts to emulate this sound module. The MT-32 emulation project was begun by Vlad Romascanu (vladr), developer of VDMSound. The first tangible results were achieved by Dean Beeler (Canada Cow), who developed the first Windows MT-32 driver and a build of an earlier version of DOSBox with built-in MT-32 emulation.

Further development has been taken over by Jerome Fisher (King Guppy) and sergm in the form of the Munt project, a multi-platform software synthesizer emulating pre-GM MIDI devices such as the MT-32 and CM-32L. Munt has been incorporated into the ScummVM project and certain developmental builds of DOSBox. There has been some great progress made on the emulator. It has become extremely close to the genuine article.

Examples

Here are some recorded samples of the intros from a few Sierra SCI games. Each pair consists of a recording from my real MT-32 Sound Module and another one made from the Munt 1.3.0 driver.

	-- King's Quest IV Intro with real MT-32
	-- King's Quest IV Intro with Munt
	-- Conquests of Camelot Intro with real MT-32
	-- Conquests of Camelot Intro with Munt
	-- Conquests of the Longbow Intro with real MT-32
	-- Conquests of the Longbow Intro with Munt
	-- Quest for Glory II Intro with real MT-32
	-- Quest for Glory II Intro with Munt
	-- The Colonel's Bequest Intro with real MT-32
	-- The Colonel's Bequest Intro with Munt

Download

You can download Munt from its SourceForge page.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/munt/

Source:

https://github.com/munt/

Note that Munt requires two ROM dumps, MT32_CONTROL.ROM and MT32_PCM.ROM. Please do not ask for these ROMs here as their legal status is somewhat in limbo. Let's just say that they are not too hard to find.

Also See

• Roland MT-32 on Wikipedia
• Munt on the Sierra Help Pages
• Munt on Wikipedia
• Munt SourceForge Project Page
• Munt GitHub Code Repository