Outrun & Wings of Fury IBM PC Speaker & Tandy 1000 Sound
8Outrun and Wings of Fury were released for the IBM PC and compatibles in 1989. Both were ported to the IBM PC platform by Unlimited Software, Inc. Outrun was ported from the Sega arcade hit while Wings of Fury was originally an Apple II game. Both have less than stellar reputations as ports, but as this video will show, they have lesser-known audio features which can improve their experience greatly.
Outrun was released in three distinct versions. All versions support CGA, Tandy, EGA/VGA and Hercules but only a maximum of the 16 colors of the Tandy/EGA palette are supported. The first release was distributed by Mindscape in the U.S. and only supports PC Speaker music and sound effects. The second release was distributed by U.S. Gold in Europe and additionally supports Tandy 1000 TI SN 76496/NCR 8496 PSG music and sound effects on older Tandy 1000s (1000, EX, HX, SX, TX). On some later Tandy 1000s equipped with the Tandy PSSJ DAC (SL, SL/2, TL, TL/2, RL) , the game supports digitized voice samples and sound effects. The third release, which was released in the U.S., is essentially the same as the second release except it replaces the male voice with a female voice.
Wings of Fury was released only once as far as is known. It supports PC Speaker sound effects or Tandy DAC sound effects on the systems previously identified.
Wings of Fury and Outrun are special because these are the only two DOS games which have been confirmed to playback digital audio samples on the Tandy DAC and do not support a Sound Blaster or any other sound card for digital playback.
Many videos on YouTube only show these games being played with PC Speaker music (Outrun only) or sound effects. In this video I will demonstrate all music and sound effect options for both games.
00:00 - Outrun PC Speaker Music
02:52 - Outrun PC Speaker Sound Effects
04:27 - Outrun Tandy Music and PSG Sound Effects
07:26 - Outrun Tandy PSG Sound Effects Only
09:00 - Outrun Tandy DAC Female Voice
09:41 - Outrun Tandy Music and DAC Sound Effects
11:42 - Outrun Tandy DAC Sound Effects Only
13:28 - Outrun Tandy DAC Male Voice
13:34 - Wings of Fury PC Speaker Sound Effects
18:05 - Wings of Fury Tandy DAC Sound Effects
In Outrun there are PC speaker sounds for the engine even with Tandy PSG or DAC Sound Effects. The three versions play similarly so playing the game after the male voice is unnecessary. These voice samples are the only examples of digitized speech in their respective versions. The PC Speaker Outrun clips were taken with the first U.S. release, the Tandy PSG Music and Sound Effects clips and the male voice clip were taken with the European release and the Tandy DAC gameplay footage and female voice used the second U.S. release.
The Tandy PSG sound effects in Outrun will not be heard in DOSBox usually because DOSBox has no ability to emulate a Tandy 1000 PSG without a DAC. If these game detect the DAC they will always use it, even if set to CGA, EGA or Hercules mode (which is broken with the built-in Hercules support of the later Tandy 1000s regardless of game version).
Unfortunately the Tandy DAC is not compatible with joysticks on the original Tandy 1000 hardware, so you will have to use keyboard controls with these games on these systems. The basic Tandy PSG-only systems have no issues with the joystick.
These games are not compatible with the Tandy 1000 TL/3, RLX, and RLX-B because they use a newer revision of the PSSJ chip that causes freezes or wrong sounds to be played. Other systems with a PSSJ chip, the 1000 RSX, the 2500 XL and the Sensation! relocated the I/O addresses of the PSSJ chip so they could be fully AT compatible and these games access the chip directly instead of using BIOS functions.
In my prior video, in which I used DOSBox for all game capture footage, dog-eared viewers noted that the volume levels seemed off with the Tandy DAC relative to the PC Speaker sound effects. So I have taken down that video and retaken all the video footage using my Tandy 1000 TX, 1000 TL, RGB2HDMI and Datapath VisionRGB E1s. All the videos that show PC Speaker or Tandy PSG-only audio used the TX, the videos with digitized audio use the TL.