I've never gotten stereo from it, and even on the top of the VirtualSynth page it says ""Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth" MIDI Out device is just... ehm... simple: poor samples, mono sound, no effects (reverb, chorus) support."

And yes, there are missing instruments sorry to say. There's plenty of times when playing MIDIs through it that parts wont play because those instruments are non-existent in the Windows GM library.

[edit] here's a post in VOGONS briefly confirming the same thing:
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=37144

Your only source is someone saying the same thing.

Let's agree to disagree, I've done this long enough :)

Windows default GS soundfont is not missing any samples, and does indeed support full stereo. However, the samples are both highly compressed (which really makes them sound pretty bad compared to the Roland GS sound canvas they are taken from), and its missing all the effects that one would find on a real Roland SC unit.

Vulchor, you may think that its mono because of the lack of effects. I can understand why as loosing anything that adds spatial effects to sound and then comparing it to something else that offers that ability can make it seem that there is a loss of a channel. On top of that, you can also disable stereo output of a soundfont without knowing you did and that leaves you with mono. You can always check to ensure your stereo output with many free music utilities like Audacity. You'll find that Microsoft GS does the ability to output stereo. Now why on earth you would want to use Microsoft GS (even with stereo enabled) when there are so many better options is beyond me, but to each their own.

Rixasha, that's a hard question to answer without the games producer to do it for us. But I can say that the game sounds best to most people on General Midi (but using a Roland Sound Canvas), it also has the FM soundtrack tweaked for taking advantage of things like the Sound Blaster and compatibles. On top of that, I think the soundtrack was also tweaked for the AWE32's EMU8k default wavetable and many think that's the best version (well that's what I remember from back in the day). I'll have to give that a try in a few weeks and see if its better than the General Midi option. Personally, I've always hated the FM soundtrack in System Shock as it sounds way to harsh.

The problem is that Windows GM is both bad and also inauthentic. While one can argue merits of different DOS era sound cards/modules forever, if they'd at least gone with one of the ones the music was arranged for it would be authentic.

It's the sound set from the Roland SC-55, but without any of the extra processing (such as reverb) that the real device was able to do.

I think the reason it was chosen is because Doom was composed on it, and Doom 95 was a bit of a selling point for Windows 95

According to the composer Greg LoPiccolo, System Shock was also composed on a Roland Sound Canvas

The only way to fly...;)

I thought mescaline was the only way to fly?...
anyhow, if i may...

System Shock 1, using BASSMIDI for higher quality music with soundfonts (.sf2)
https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=3188

that page ^ links to: ¥Weeds¥ General MIDI SoundFont (and a bunch of others)
...which is a pretty nice soundfont
plug that into the MIDI plugin for XMPlay directly (http://support.xmplay.com/)

FWIW I actually helped getting VirtualMIDISynth properly working with SS1 back in 2013 when i was looking for an alternative to BASSMIDI
http://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/node/68

If these other soundfonts are so much better, why isn't anyone taking the midi's, running them through the soundfonts and tossing up a FLAC download?

Yeah, why aren't you?


Seriously though, it's a fairly trivial thing to do. Here's a few:
8MBGMSFX
OPL-3 FM
WeedsGM3
FluidR3

Because I like GoG's version over what I'm hearing on youtube through soundfonts. I also can't into soundfonts. I'll try these out, thanks.