Roland MT-32 - Emulation

Emulation

Due to the popularity of the MT-32 as a music playback device for PC games, many modern sound cards provide a simple "MT-32 emulation mode", usually realized by way of a sound mapping comprised either of General MIDI instruments rearranged to roughly represent the MT-32's preset sound bank, or of samples directly recorded from the original unit. Results are often considered poor, as the sampling technology used can not reflect the pitch- and time-variable characteristics of the original synthesizer technology, with the programming of custom sounds (see above) not being supported at all. One exception is the Orchid SoundWave 32 card released by Orchid in 1994, whose on-board DSP allowed for a more faithful reproduction of the original sound characteristics.

More recently, there have been attempts at emulating the LA synthesizer technology in software using images of the original PCM and control ROMs. The most notable of these emulators is the Open Source project, Munt, which currently tries to emulate the MT-32 hardware by way of a WDM driver for Windows XP. It is also incorporated into ScummVM, an Open Source adventure game interpreter, as of version 0.7.0. Munt is based on an earlier MT-32 Emulation Project, which was the source of a short-lived legal squabble over distribution of the original ROM images with Roland Corporation, who manufactured the MT-32 and claims copyright on the ROM's data.

Roland has recently been offering its own emulation of classic synthesizers, notably of the D-50.

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