Athlon 64 with Roland MT-32?

hey Phil can you build a retro gaming PC with these two mystery items and then share a game that you're really passionate about okay so wow we have the Roland mt-32 it's been a while since we've used this in a project on this channel so I'm really excited and what else have we got oh my it's the MD Athlon 64. so yeah I think this will be interesting so let's have a look at what we can do here we have all the parts and you know the slogan slow is good we're dealing with really old games many of them are speed sensitive so once the system is up and running we will try to slow it down as much as we can the main board is an Asus a8v for socket 939 we have 256 megabytes of ram this is the smallest capacity module I could find for the graphics we have a GeForce 4 mx440 that's all we need under dos compatibility is pretty decent it outputs in DVI and it will scale everything to 1080p some games don't like the 60 hertz refresh rate and also the output is a little bit on the soft side so for actually playing games you want to use the VGA output for the storage we have a USB floppy emulator the gotek so we can boot from a boot disk and then format partition and and make the storage bootable we have a 32 gigabyte SSD together with the star tech SATA 2 Rd adapter we also need a midi cable this plugs into the game port and it gives you midi in and midi out and this is the Athlon 64. it's a 3800 plus running at 2.4 gigahertz with 512 kilobytes of level 2 cache the machine turned on just fine and I'm installing MS-DOS from a boot floppy Drive partitioning and formatting the disk and then I connect the SSD to a modern computer and copy over the Dos files benchmarks some games and some utilities next we're using the Dos Benchmark pack you can download that from my website and resources download links Down Below in the video description so out of the box this machine is fast for example in Quake at 320 by 200 we're getting 229 FPS yes and at 640 by 480 we're getting 83.3 FPS so this machine is way too fast for our project to slow the machine down we start with disabling the cache there is Goodwin's set mile utility it can do a lot of things but the main purpose of this program is to disable the CPU cache and then I'm running the 3D bench Benchmark I have a good idea of what the results mean we're getting 49 that is way too fast still that's on the level of a decent 486 dx2 so now we head into the BIOS and I will lower the CPU multiplier but this is also a good opportunity to lower the voltage here we have the machine in Windows and we can see coolant quite in action the multiplier is going down to 6X with a voltage of around 1.1 so I'm dialing in those settings in the Bios and 3D bench is now 39.9 now in the Bios I can see there is a 4X setting to lower the clock speed even further but the machine wouldn't post with that setting now I forgot the name but one of you mentioned in a previous video to change the HT frequency that's the hyper transport bus so I'm going into the options and I'm lowering that to 200 megahertz and yes now the machine boots let's have a look at 3D bench 30.4 we need to slow it down even more let's change the ram frequency out of the box it runs at 200 megahertz let's slow it down to 100 megahertz and now look at that 25.4 that is already pretty good there's one more thing we can do and that is the memory timings at first I lowered the memory timings for every single parameter but the machine wouldn't post so I'm trying again and I'm just changing the first four parameters those are the ones uh the classic memory timings I'm setting the lowest timings and now we get a 3D bench score of 21.8 and that is pretty decent in to put that into perspective a 386 running at 40 megahertz gets a score of around 15. so this is still a little bit on the high side but it's not too bad we're looking at the performance of a very basic 486 maybe running at 25 megahertz so now we have a machine that's working this speed is slowed down nicely I tested a few games no crashes everything is working and at the moment I'm only getting the PC speaker sound I plugged in a little speaker onto the header so we need something to connect the Roland mt32 we need the midi interface so one option is with a PCI sound card however in the Bios under the resources I saw a sound card on board sound card but also a game port and a midi device mentioned but if we look at the back of the motherboard there is no game Port here so I looked around on the motherboard and there's a header here it's right here and that mentions game so this must be the game Port I kept all the parts that came with this motherboard like the manual and the driver disk and the i o Shield but I didn't have that specific game Port cable so I looked into my boxes of goodies and I found this adapter so it gives you two USB ports here's the game port and it has some connectors at the other hand and yeah I was really surprised I actually did not expect this to work but it does without any drivers so this is a hardware midi port and and it worked beautifully the Roland mt32 requires a very unique midi interface it needs intelligent mode support and unfortunately most sound cards including what we have on this motherboard doesn't support intelligent mode and this is another situation where the community is so fantastic we have a project called Soft mpu it is developed by two users BJT and aliander you run the program you specify the port which is 330 and off we go we now have intelligent node compatibility software mpu works pretty well but it requires some processing power so once you slow down the machine to a level of a 386 or 486 you will notice in many games that send midi signals to the mt32 to reprogram the effects so to speak this will take much longer than on a real intelligent mode midi interface so just keep that in mind the game we're testing today especially in the beginning you will have to wait like a minute or two for the upload to complete and now I have a beautiful game I want to share and introduce to you it is the heart of China and this is a point and click adventure game so in this video I will only show footage from the beginning because if I show images from later then there's not much reason to play this game so this game launched in 1991 by Dynamics and wow this company has a huge Legacy of awesome games I had a look at their release history and they started really early in 1984 for example Stella 740 Commodore 64. most of the early games used 3D Graphics games like arctic fox or Sky Fox 2 F-14 Tomcat in the late 80s we started to get games for dos for example the train escaped from Normandy a very unique game we also got Abram's battle tank and Mech Warrior which yeah this is the first version released in 1989 for dos and other games like A10 Tank Killer and Ghostbusters too so they did a heap of variety of games rise of the Dragon was I believe their first point in click adventure game released in 1990 then we got the adventures of Willie Beamish and the Heart of China launched in 1991. when you launched the game it says Dynamics part of the Sierra family this is because in 1990 Sierra bought Dynamics this is a game I never really played until now I actually beat this game just a few days ago I was living in Austria going to school and we had the Media Markt which is yeah a big market for electronics and they also had a Computing section with various 386 machines on display and yeah whoever was in charge there they installed games on these computers like Indianapolis 500 Wing commander and also the heart of China and back then the graphics were absolutely amazing with digitized Graphics of real people and the graphics haven't aged well I'm playing with a modern LCD display you get the chunky pixels but back then you would have a 14 or 15 inch cot Monitor and the graphics would look much nicer they used real actors which they photographed with hand painted backgrounds basically very high production value but of course you have a budget so most of the actors were staff and their relatives in the user manual in the introduction Jeff tunnel he mentions that they had to rework their artwork twice on two occasions to blend in together so most of the production schedule and budget seems to have been gone into the graphics in terms of audio you can play with the plain PC speaker but it's a very boring experience The Sound Blaster is much better or ad-lib I don't think there's too much of a difference in this game and at the high end If you experience this game with the Roland mt32 it sounds absolutely beautiful in the manual it mentions that this game will take you on a whirlwind Globe spanning Adventure that captures the flavor and romance of exotic locations and characters I have showcased this game many times and it's a go-to game I test with compatibility in mind if your machine is too fast for example it won't initialize your sound card and yeah finally I got to sit down print out all the documentation and really play this one I bought the game on Gog and it's a really good release initially in the old days it it was bundled with dosbox now it's packaged with scum VM but in the extras folder you can find the Dos executable and played on a real retro PC the documentation they are scanned really well in good quality you get a user manual a reference card a travel guide and a hint book Many point-and-click Adventures you can basically just yeah start and off you go you know exactly what to do but this one is not quite like it it can be a little bit confusing as to what you have to do I highly recommend that you read all the manuals it explains a lot and it also sets the mood for this game and gives you a few hints in the beginning they make a big deal about this game not being linear well it sort of is still very linear but there are multiple plot paths and with the heart of China they introduced this concept of a story brand alert so when you try something in the game and then you get this warning Branch alert it's telling you that you could have done something different to get maybe a different outcome but that mechanic is a little bit confusing because it doesn't really tell you what you did was that good or was it bad did you miss out on an item so I I kind of like what they were trying to do but in in reality it doesn't work too well so in the end most of the game is still very linear there are a couple of puzzles you can solve in different ways but it really doesn't make me want to replay it again time plays a big part in this game the longer you take to complete the game the less money you make so every day that passes you lose twenty thousand dollars of your budget and a lot in the game depends on how you communicate with the characters and that can be a little bit annoying with some of the characters you have to be really polite but with other ones you have to be really aggressive to get the good outcome so it's a lot of trial and error the good news is you can save frequently I think over 20 save files and if you're full you can add another path and save some more games the game is actually really short and what I think happened is they spent so much time on the acting and the art and getting all the those hand-painted backgrounds going that there wasn't much time left for the game so they added this branching to add the perception of additional value but once you've figured out all the options I think you can finish this game in 20 minutes or half an hour so it is really a very short game the story involves you traveling from Hong Kong to Paris and there's Hong Kong Chengdu Kathmandu Istanbul then there's the orange Express and finally Paris however the Orient Express in Paris there's really there's nothing are you doing there in the Orient Express there's just a scene where you uh communicate and Paris is the final destination so really it's just a handful of locations there are two arcade sequences in the game the Chengdu tank sequence and the Orient Express train battle both of them are speed sensitive especially the tank battle on the machine that's too fast it's impossible to control you can skip those sequences however because they can be quite tricky and frustrating so if you don't want to play them just choose to skip and you can continue with the adventure game a few tips to Play It Again to find the hot spots of objects that you can interact with just press the tab key on the keyboard it will cycle through all the hot spots and also read the manual about how you can equip your character with the gun and how to shoot it that's again mechanic that a lot of people weren't quite sure how to do that and I could read in the gug Forum that there's one sequence where you have to shoot the gun and a lot of people seem to get stuck in that aspect all in all what are my thoughts on this game well in a way I'm a little bit disappointed and also with the Nostalgia in mind yeah now you open the box you know you know what the reality is so some of the imaginations that I had of this game yeah now it's reality not quite what I was hoping for it's not a terrible game the graphics are really the highlight and the Roland mt32 music is also absolutely beautiful but in terms of point-and-click adventure games there are much better games from Sierra and Lucas out you can play this game happily on dosbox with the month mt-32 emulator and then you can also activate the perfect pixel scaling and even use an overlay to get a cot uh effect to make it look like a CET monitor so you're not missing out too much but of course it's a different experience playing it on a retro PC with a nice CT Monitor and having the real sound card to play through your vintage retro gaming PC so this was a fun project slowing down the iPhone 64 and connecting it with a Roland mt-32 a couple years back I would have never thought that that's possible but yeah it seems if the if you find a midi or game port on a motherboard that's a real option to connect some vintage midi devices and unlike with General midi the Roland m232 most games that support it use it for music and sound effects it was only with I believe Wing Commander 2 maybe a few other games around that era where the concept of supporting two sound devices became relevant there are many games that support the mt-32 it's not just the big titles from Sierra LucasArts and origin there are many games even less well-known games that support it so there's actually a huge library of games that you can experience with such a machine for this project it wasn't necessary it but I believe on some motherboards you can slow it down even further inside the Via chipset there is some sort of a duty cycle feature that you can activate maybe that's something we'll look at in a future video to slow it down even more but a early 486 is already pretty decent in terms of Dos compatibility the heart of China well this game will still hold a special place in my heart it kinda didn't turn out what I was hoping for the graphics are beautiful the sound is amazing the music is fantastic but the gameplay is a little bit on the boring side maybe in the future I will play it again try out some of those different paths but I already got the happy ending in the end there are different endings that's quite a modern concept actually so depending on what options you choose when you communicate with the characters and your actions you can get different endings so that's quite novel but I already got the the happy ending in the end so I'm pretty happy and now I want to hear from you what is your take on the Roland mt-32 and were you surprised by what you saw here or is that something you already knew is possible and what are your thoughts on the heart of China and games from that period as well as yeah more love for point-and-click adventure games I really enjoy that genre back in the day yeah I had a few consoles like the the first the Super Nintendo and The Game Boy I could almost never finish any of these games like Jump Around games it's just not my thing they're just too hard but when point-and-click Adventures came out and win command only PC that was my time finally I could yeah have enjoyed games with some puzzles there was no timer or fast reaction time you could enjoy the atmosphere and yeah the games were mostly in English so at the time we had some English in school but it was very basic English so I would have a dictionary and you know translate some of the vocabulary and yeah I really have font memories of the time and it's a genre you can still get some Modern point-and-click adventure games but it's definitely a very small Niche there you go thank you so much for watching if you're new to the channel yeah please stick around subscribe we work with old computers to enjoy classic games bring back happy memories but I also help you out to build your own retro PC so in the video description you will find resources downloads for example how to set up the Dos boot menu or the Dos Benchmark pack to make it easier for you to get up and running and that's it thank you so much for watching I shall see you soon with another one

Channel: PhilsComputerLab

Views: 11,460

Keywords: Roland MT-32, Athlon 64, DOS, Retro Games, Old School, Retro, Gaming, Games, GOG, MS-DOS, MIDI

Id: EP0-TkU4l9o

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023