Musical X-COM

[kai]

Recently I've found that when playing UFO/TFTD, if you hit the windows key and then go back in to the game, the music ends up sounding much better.

 

Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening?

[BladeFireLight]

i'm asuming that this is a dos version.

 

It wouls be posible that switching the windows causes windows to use a switch the music device the game is using to one with sond font capability

 

-Blade FireLight

[kai]

Nope, Windows version (Though I am using an ancient ISA sound card?)

[The Demi-Godly One]

Well, the music does sound much better on the old/low quality sound cards. Maybe minimizing switches what to "send" the sound to, do you have anything else on your computer which could possibly produce sound?

[Mouse Nightshirt]

I notice the same effect. Try changing you midi synth in your sound properties.

[Mouse Nightshirt]

Or, you could find the PSX version which has hugely better music (3 different Tactical bg music tracks instead of 1, more geoscape bg music and more music everywhere else etc )

[NKF]

More Geoscape sequences? Actually, both of the geoscape sequences from the PC version were split into two parts for the PSX. Track 5 for example begins roughly 4 minutes into the gmgeo2 music sequence.

 

Neat stuff all the same. The only music track that I'm not familiar with is track 12, which I'm told is the second battlescape track.

 

As for the CE edition of ufo, it uses the same midi sample table as Windows. since it uses DirectX for its midi output. It does seem a little unusual that switching between the programs changes the sounds. But as it is happening with a dated soundcard, I suppose it's not that unusual. My old win95 machine with an older SB pro will only let one program use the soundcard for midi and SFX output at any given time. When it switches between various multimedia programs, it often muddles the midi output for a bit, but it eventually goes back to normal after a while.

 

- NKF