Game:

King's Quest VI (1992)

Duration: 15:00

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46

This video compares the music of King's Quest 6 on a Sound Blaster and a Roland SC-88. Jump to 7:29 for the SC-88 version.

Sometime around 1992, Sierra stopped optimizing their music for the Roland MT-32, and (like many others at this time) started using General MIDI. Although these games still support the MT-32, they just put it in a pseudo-GM mode which sounds okay but doesn't use any of its unique features.

For General MIDI there are much better options than the MT-32. One such option is the Roland Sound Canvas, a mid-90s module that many Sierra games are optimized for, and which still sounds good even today.

The module used here is the Roland Sound Canvas SC-88, released in 1994, the successor to the SC-55 that was around at the time KQ6 was released.

The Sound Blaster sound is emulated by ScummVM 1.2, so a real Sound Blaster will probably sound slightly better. The difference is not very big, however. A genuine Roland SC-88 was used. The SC-88 version still uses the Sound Blaster for digital sound such as speech.

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