Munt: An MT-32 Emulator - The Sierra Help Pages

Munt

An MT-32 Emulator

Sierra was a pioneer in music for games. The music of many of their earlier SCI games was written for the Roland MT-32 Sound module, starting with King's Quest IV. This pre-GM MIDI technology had sound samples and was programmable. Music written for it sounded great and lent a great deal to the Sierra experience.

If you are used to the hoots, honks and tweets of AdLib music, you owe it to yourself to play these old classics with an MT-32, but unfortunately, the MT-32 is obsolete and can only be found used. You might try to find an MT-32 on eBay.

A Roland MT-32 Sound Module loading Space Quest III

There is good news for those that do not have an MT-32, but wish to play their Sierra games with the music the way it was meant to be heard. Some of you might be aware of efforts to emulate this sound module. The MT-32 emulation project was begun by Vlad Romascanu (vladr), developer of VDMSound. The first tangible results were achieved by Dean Beeler (Canada Cow), who developed the first Windows MT-32 driver and a build of an earlier version of DOSBox with built-in MT-32 emulation.

Further development has been taken over by Jerome Fisher (King Guppy) and sergm in the form of the Munt project, a multi-platform software synthesizer emulating pre-GM MIDI devices such as the MT-32 and CM-32L. Munt has been incorporated into the ScummVM project and certain development builds of DOSBox.

A driver and a MUNT QT App is downloadable from the SourceForge Munt Page, but does not include the necessary ROMs. You will need to find those separately.

The MUNT QT App loading The The Colonel's Bequest

Here are a few samples from a few of the Sierra games both with my real MT-32 and with the Munt driver. Munt is not quite there yet, but is starting to get close.

01 - King's Quest IV Intro with real MT-32
02 - King's Quest IV Intro with Munt
03 - Conquests of Camelot Intro with real MT-32
04 - Conquests of Camelot Intro with Munt
05 - Conquests of the Longbow Intro with real MT-32
06 - Conquests of the Longbow Intro with Munt
07 - Quest for Glory II Intro with real MT-32
08 - Quest for Glory II Intro with Munt
09 - The Colonel's Bequest Intro with real MT-32
10 - The Colonel's Bequest Intro with Munt

So download and install the Munt driver and start enjoying your early Sierra SCI games with the music as it was meant to be.

Note: Vista and Windows 7 users may need to also download Putzlowitsch's Vista MIDI Mapper Control Panel to change to the Munt driver.

Windows 10 & 11 users can use CoolSoft MIDIMapper to change to the Munt driver.

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