King's Quest 5 - Music differences between DOS and Win versions

I made this video for the ScummVM devs for information regarding support for Sierra's SCI adventure games. The CD Windows version of King's Quest V had an alternate soundtrack in certain places than either DOS version from the disk or CD. The DOS soundtrack was MT-32 and the Windows version was General MIDI. Besides that, there were a handful of alternate tracks that were reworked from the original MT-32 score. Namely, the Weeping Willow themes. There may be more but I haven't gone through the entire game to check.

I used DOSBox to capture the video footage of the DOS version and the Windows version in Windows 3.11.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• king's
• king
• quest
• sierra
• adventure
• brandon
• blume
• music
• mark
• seibert
• ken
• allen
• weeping
• willow
• cd
• win
• windows
• dos
• version
• alternate
• different

[BrandonBlume]

Fascinating, everybody. Thanks for your comments! Really interesting stuff.

[janmansde3dede]

I can't really hear the different notes... except for the forest of course

But two stupid questions, When playing in Windows 3 can you remove

The stupid window bar when playing a game in Fullscreen ?

And can you also have the same instruments ? I mean Im sure there's no way

that between the DOS and WIN3 Adlib, Soundblaster and Roland will sound/operate different !

Sorry.

[BrandonBlume]

@janmansde3dede No the title bar in Windows mode does not go away, unfortunately. It IS playing in fullscreen mode. It also squished the game aspect ratio to a16:9 resolution when it should be 4:3 with rectangular pixels.

And no, there's no way to get it to sound the same. Windows MIDI drivers are infinitely different than DOS drivers. The DOS versions of the games use their own sounds for Adlib while the Windows version just uses Windows' MIDI driver and doesn't have its own.

[OmerMor]

Fascinating!

I wonder what triggered the change?

[BrandonBlume]

@OmerMor I believe it was because the singing part that's present on the CD version was better sung this way than the other. It keeps all the notes together rather than moving up and down the scale the old way which would require a greater vocal range, as NRS pointed out on the QS forums. So they changed all the MIDI tracks to be consistent.

[ziggypotter]

Interesting Brandon! I only remember playing the old dos (also the old "mac") version. Musically I do prefer the old notation, but the change makes sense to better accommodate a vocal rendition.

[Possatboi]

Be careful, King Graham! D:

[BrandonBlume]

@CyclopeanLiam Interesting! I hadn't heard the correlation. Nice observation.

[cpthurme]

Nice work, DOS sounds way better to me

[brandon9271]

I personally like the DOS music better.. The Windows versions sound sort of sparse to me... :-/ OR maybe I'm just being nostalgic since I played in DOS ;)

[jdproductions321]

awesome job

[aridchicken]

Sierra often used a different file range for Windows interpreters. For example, if you open the KQ6 windows config file (sierra.ini) you see the line "cursorview = TRUE". This tells the interpreter to add +2000 when it searches for the cursor files. Go into the SCI resource viewer and compare 998.v56 to 2998.v56. The 998 view file is the colorized cursor set used in DOS and the 2998 view is a black & white set used for windows.

[aridchicken]

You can get General MIDI to work in DOS by extracting the Windows files and renaming them to the DOS range. (i.e. rename 1001.snd to 1.snd, etc...) Then copy the genmidi.drv and an extracted 4.pat from any GM native game. (I used QG3). You also need to extract the Sierra Logo music from this same game and rename it to 500.snd and use this.

Warning: The windows sound files contain only basic & extended General MIDI tracks and using them in the DOS range will cripple the MT-32 & AdLib tracks.

[aridchicken]

Yes, they are two different versions. This is also the case with the CD-ROM version of Mixed Up Mother Goose and Jones in the Fast Lane. The 0-999 .snd files are the DOS range and the 1000-1999 .snd files are the Windows range.