Prince of Persia

I came across this forum (and SDLPoP) and immediately became interested.

I want to make my own MIDI renditions of the music with soundfonts to use in SDLPoP, so I ripped the MIDIs from the game, but found that the instrumentation was not GM standard (predictably, as it's a DOS game with Adlib). I know the game supported the MT-32, and the Mac version had sample based instruments as well.

Is there any way I can learn what all of the instruments are supposed to be so I can reassign the instruments to GM? The channels are often labeled stuff like "melody" and rarely instrument names.

Blastfrog wrote:instrumentation was not GM standard

Are you sure it's not?

When I open "arrived to princess.mid" with Ardour, the first channel seems to start with instrument 14(+1) of bank 0(+1), which according to the gm-level-1-sound-set is Tubular Bells.

This matches what
timidity --verbose=1 "arrived to princess.mid"
tells me, namely "Tonebank 0 14: Tone_000/014_Tubular_Bells.pat".

I guess maybe what you're saying is that instead of Tubular Bells it's using something else there?

Well, there's some instruments that are rarely labeled, the title screen music has a channel called "comp/tympani", being piano 1 and electric piano 1. They all sound pretty messed up in GM anyway IMO.

Blastfrog wrote:Is there any way I can learn what all of the instruments are supposed to be so I can reassign the instruments to GM? The channels are often labeled stuff like "melody" and rarely instrument names.

You could try this: Make a MIDI that plays something using a single instrument. Then import it to a DAT and listen how it sounds within the game.

Norbert wrote:When I open "arrived to princess.mid" with Ardour, the first channel seems to start with instrument 14(+1) of bank 0(+1), which according to the gm-level-1-sound-set is Tubular Bells.

The problem is that the MIDI player built into PoP uses its own instruments ("midi info" in prince.dat), not the General Midi instruments.

Blastfrog wrote:I know the game supported the MT-32, and the Mac version had sample based instruments as well.

Yes, but those aren't General Midi instruments, either.