I miss the UFO Defense sounds of my childhood

[crazedc]

Good morning, gents. I've been playing the PCGamer Collector's Edition version of Enemy Unknown for years, but I've always missed the alien death noises that I grew up with playing the original floppy disk DOS version of UFO Defense. Is there any patch or mod I can load on so I can enjoy the old sounds? Thanks.

[Pete]

I'm no expert, but this might work with your version: https://www.strategycore.co.uk/files/index.php?dlid=17 . There may also be other files in our files section that may help.

 

Failing that, someone a little more knowledgeable than I may be able to help

[Gimli]

My suggestion would be to do the following: copy the .mid files from the Sound folder of that patch into the Sound folder of the game, this should replace the sounds.

But here's something interesting, if you replace the UFO Defense.exe file with the one from this patch, the game will work without the need for f0dder's patch to fix garbled graphics (UFO.exe and musfix.dll), the Geoscape will run at a nice speed (not too fast or too slow) and you can also add mp3 files (read the .txt files in the patch).

[NKF]

The mid files are only the music, and only present in the collectors edition. The sample?.cat and sound?.cat files contain the sound samples (although one set is unused, and has been notably left out of the collectors edition).

 

Copying the old .cat files into CE or Dos v1.4 won't work as the locations of the sound effects will differ on account of the higher sampling rate. There was patch mentioned somewhere in the support forum, either here or on xcomufo's support forum that brought the old samples back. A bit of investigating might dig something up.

 

- NKF

[crazedc]

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. In a freak turn of fate, my sound is now completely broken I probably shouldn't have tried to fix my USB port on my own with tweezers when it was turned on Now I have to shell out $200 for a new motherboard before I can even try out your theories...but thanks again. To be continued...

[Slaughter]

You should consider yourself lucky. If it had been a true freak turn of fate, you'd be six feet under in a box now . Granted there's likely not enough power in the USB port to do that, but I wouldn't take any chances.

[Zombie]

I on the other hand, have never even heard the original sounds of the game before yesterday. My biggest issue was compatibility: DOS games and an XP operating system don't play nice. I even tried DOS Box with no luck. Well, last night I needed to install my original EU CD for some testing and tried one last time to get it to work. Don't know what I did differently this time but it works! Basically spent most of the evening enjoying the game all over again. Hands down, the best sounds are the the original ones (a close second though is the PSX). My favorite is the end-of-mission summary music. Nice!

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

The music from the dos version generally sounds better than the CE, as it uses a different MIDI FM synthesizer table than the one being used by Windows. You'll probably notice this even in 1.4, as only the raw sound effect samples were changed between that and the earlier releases.

 

Music quality will vary from soundcard to soundcard obviously, but the Dos synthesizer playback is almost always superior to the Windows version. I mean, even I impressed with the generally monotonous battlescape music in my old dos version once I started using headphones and could pick up the deep bass. Maybe it was just a rhythm my own head was devising... The geoscape tracks also sound the way they were meant to - there are some bits that don't seem to play right under Windows midi playback.

 

- NKF

[NKF]

Okay, now I've just had a bit of an interesting discovery. There must be different versions of UFO for Dos out there that use different sounds sets for the intro!

 

I assisted someone through e-mail in converting the dos cd version of UFO into a full install to prep it for use with dosbox (easier that way). I physically ran through the steps myself to doublecheck my notes. Everything went fine, problem solved.

 

Today I thought I'd give the game a spin and let the intro run. Lo and behold, I've never heard these sound effects before! (Well, okay I have, but never playing during the actual intro). The group of mutons flying through the air went 'Aaaah!', the X-Com klaxon sounded less exiting. You actually hear the operator say 'Warning UFO Detected', etc. The one I'm familiar with has a muffled voice that sounds like "pashofa pashofa".

 

Most interesting. Guess I never really noticed since I generally skip the intro and play CE more often where there aren't any sounds played.

 

- NKF

[Zombie]

I guess now that you mention it, yeah, the intro has some interesting stuff buried in there if you get it to play. I heard the "UFO Detected" warning you mentioned in the sounds that Danial ripped out of the game when I listened to it a while back. I initially thought that it was unused because it isn't present in the CE version. (Come to think of it, it's not in the PSX either). Guess it's used after all.

 

Care to post up the steps you took to get the game ready for DosBox? Not that it matters much now that I got my copy running, but it may be good to compare notes.

 

- Zombie

[NKF]

Probably the same method used, if perhaps not the same order.

 

1. Make target directory you want the game to go in.

 

2. Copy entire contents of CD into that directory, except the manual parts, extras and Adobe Acrobat. Pretty much anything that you know clearly isn't needed by the game.

 

3. Check that game_1 through game_10 and Missdat directories are present, if not create them manually. Didn't really need to do this step thanks to the dum.bin dummy files, but you never know.

 

4. Prune the main directory and leave all the directories and the following files:

 

DOS4GW.EXE

INTRO.EXE

SETUP.EXE

SOUND.CFG

UFOCD.BAT

 

And maybe the PDF Manual for reference.

 

5. Rename ufocd.bat to ufo.bat. Not strictly necessary, and you could name it anything you want. The file's not needed at all if you intend to run the game with XComutil's runxcom.bat.

 

6. Load up dosbox, go through the whole rigmarole of mounting the game directory and navigating to it.

 

7. Run the sound setup and the game's all ready to go.

 

- NKF

[Gimli]

Well, there's a nice setup of the game on Steam. It saves time having to get it running. I can post that here, since it's only the dosbox.conf file.

 

Anyway, I had the DOS version first, so I know about the sounds. It's much better with them. By the way, if you use this sound patch you can get teh sounds in the intro. You can also play .mp3 files. I have the music from Cydonias Fall playing, but it's not tuned to it well. Wish I had a program for editing music.