This has bothered me for the longest time. For some odd reason, the DOS Humongous games (Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, both Fun Packs and The Activity Pack) have MIDI based scores not unlike most other DOS SCUMM games, but they're nowhere close to how they should sound when you use the default settings. If I'm not mistaken, they should sound somewhere close to how it would if you ran it on DOSBox or a real DOS machine with a Sound Blaster or the like, but instead they sound completely different. It's hard to exactly state what it sounds like, but here's some videos to aid you. I uploaded some quick samples of what it sounds like and SVM and am attaching you some walkthroughs I made on a native DOS machine for comparison (this is how it sounds on DOSBox as well).
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade:
Real DOS machine -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1-4fZvqDfk
ScummVM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TxYTUQQi-s
Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise:
Real DOS machine -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeIBfGzDUMI
ScummVM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUsAzJNpMfk
Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon:
Real DOS machine -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-KunJB1wEQ
ScummVM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyvMiLYGbbU
I know this can't be intentional. I've played the DOS LucasArts games on ScummVM and they sound like the real deal, so why are these any different? Am I missing something here, or is this a legitimate error? And if it is, I'd like to see this corrected, because it's been a problem for a fair amount longer than I'd like.
This issue affects only the DOS and Macintosh versions of these games; because the Windows versions use pre-recorded wave audio, they don't suffer from this problem. You can use the free demos of these games that are up for download on the SVM site even if you don't have the original games if you want to work on this. As far as I know, this affects every version of ScummVM that supports these games, including the latest daily snapshot which I tested this with as well (as you can see in the video). Running on Windows.
