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I thought I would be silly and listen to the Erana's Peace song in QfG1VGA with different emulated/real sound hardware in DOSBox, and I noticed that the game has a PC speaker music driver but not a Tandy 3-voice one (which I guess makes sense, as Tandy 3-voice machines probably wouldn't support VGA?).

Is there an SCI1-compatible music driver for Tandy 3-voice out there?

Edit: I guess Game Blaster probably comes pretty close to what it would sound like.

There is a Tandy 3-voice driver for SCI1.0, but not for SCI1.1 (which QFG1VGA is).

Does it even have a Tandy track?

Actually, it does upon investigation with SCI Companion. Probably carried over from the SCI0 version though. SQ5's Tandy driver is just a PC Speaker driver in disguise. I don't think one exists for SCI1.1.

I didn't know that SCI games had separate soundtracks per audio device. I figured they just wrote the drivers to play an appropriate subset of note tracks from the song.

I think I got a good enough flavor via the Game Blaster driver, and I could probably check out the original EGA version if I were really curious.

HunterZ wrote:I didn't know that SCI games had separate soundtracks per audio device. I figured they just wrote the drivers to play an appropriate subset of note tracks from the song.

Partially right. There are multiple channels in each sound resource and only certain channels play depending on what driver you are running the game with. Some channels are entirely unique and separate from what you hear in other drivers. So it isn't always just that certain channels are silenced for say something like the Tandy driver, but there are alternate variations of melodies designed specifically for other music devices. For instance, the SQ4 opening sequence in PC speaker is completely different from every other sound device because Ken Allen reworked it entirely himself in about one day before release because he was unhappy with the conversion that someone else did.

Ah, that makes total sense, thanks.

I knew that KQ4 SCI had a Tandy track because I played the game originally on a Tandy 1000 PC. I forget what the track sounds like now since its been well over 20 years since then. Not sure if it is similar to the AGI version of KQ4.

Every SCI0 game has a Tandy soundtrack and most if not all SCI1.0 games. AGI also has Tandy soundtracks, but they're not the same. The differences between AGI and SCI Tandy scores are that SCI Tandy scores have volume envelopes on their instruments which means notes have a volume decay. AGI has this as well (though I think it's preset whereas SCI's is configurable I believe? Not with any tools we currently have with SCI Studio, though...I could be wrong), but one thing AGI does have that SCI curiously does not is the noise "channel". Tandy 3-voice has a capability to play noise which isn't really a 4th channel, but produces noise on ALL channels at the same time notes are being played. Anyway, AGI has it and SCI doesn't which is a shame. But then I also don't see how it would be possible with MIDI-based music files to trigger sounds....I'm sure they could have come up with a way, though.