Has anyone actually managed to get the CD audio tracks to play in Battle Isle 2? What plays during the game is clearly MIDI, and when I go to the menu and play a CD track, all I get is silence. If I go into the install program and change anything involving the audio, then Battle Isle 2 refuses to start entirely and has to be reinstalled.

If anyone out there has gotten CD audio to play, what did you do?

Yeah, it's exactly the same for me. But it seems that you can find the original audio tracks in OGG format in the game folder. Just listen to them. They are the exact same songs played by an above-average soundcard or something. Just use a custom soundfont and the MIDI tracks should sound just as good or even better.

Also I'm not sure whether using CD audio tracks allows for the combat music to play while it certainly does work when using a General MIDI device. So who knows, maybe using a MIDI device/emulation is the best way to play the game.

If you like old games than you should consider buying Roland MT32. Since most older games have the option of using it as more "advanced" soundcard. It sounds a LOT of better than SoundBlaster.

BI2 is no exeption. I use MT32 while playing it so it sounds very good compared to soundblaster. I use it with most of gog games like Wing Commander series and others.

MT32 is quite difficult to obtain and cofigure in windows but once you do it, its great buy! I heard that there are emulators of Roland so you can give it a try..

Indeed, there's custom builds of DosBox that include MUNT, works pretty nicely (although I've personally only tried it for Wing Commander so far, others have also used it on Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures), certainly beats spending a fortune on old hardware which is also hard to set up. Sadly the distribution is illegal because Roland has never given up the rights to the ROMs or patches or whatever data from the original hardware you need. True, it does sound much better for many games but often you're better off just using a custom Soundfont in General MIDI mode. Not all games that support the MT32 make use of all of its features so General Midi with a nice soundbank may provide even nicer results.