Roland SC-55 vs. Yamaha MU80: The Ultimate MS-DOS MIDI Showdown
Grand MS-DOS Gaming General MIDI Showdown
I pit the legendary Roland SC-55 against Yamaha's MU80 and their software emulations, recording 46 classic DOS game soundtracks on seven different MIDI modules for a total of 322 lossless recordings. I also share my personal impressions and provide all MIDI files and REAPER projects so you can judge for yourself.
The Roland SC-55 sound module is the undisputed king of mid-late 90s General MIDI music in MS-DOS retro gaming circles. Well, I’m going to dispute that a bit in the present article.
- TazeTSchnitzel
> Although not perfect, [Sound Canvas VA] is the closest recreation of the original SC-55 in software form as of 2023.
Ah, this submission should have a “(2023)” added to the title. In 2024, Nuked-SC55 (https://github.com/nukeykt/Nuked-SC55) was released, which is a fully accurate software emulation of the SC-55/SC-55mkII (it relies on having the original ROM files).
- blightful
I have played around with a lot of general midi hardware. have a sc55mk2, sc88, sc155, mt32, MU1000, MU15, and the one I want to talk about Alesis Nanosynth. I actually think the Nanosynth is the most interesting and can provide really good results. The others sound a lot alike for the most part, well other than mt32 for the soundtracks designed for it. Also fun is to run midi through multiple devices and pick and choose the channels to create a new mix.
- morsch
They link to a cornucopia of samples they made available on archive.org at the bottom of the article (not in-line, where I was looking for them). Doom, which is fairly widely known, starts at #57: https://archive.org/details/DOS-Gaming-General-MIDI-Comparis...