Hey all, just started into UU1. I used to watch my dad play it as a little kid and sometimes late at night (ok... like 10pm) I would hear him "battling" and get out of bed to see what was up. The music from this game is programmed into my soul.

I've played it a few times in emulators (I have a mac now) and I never got far because of poor controls and constant problems. Now GOG delivers this wonderful gift, but... something isn't right... the music... its close, but its.. different. I am not crazy. But it's close enough that it can't be a copyright thing can it? is it a mac/dos thing? Can someone tell me? I'm trying to get past it but until I know whats up this is just driving me nuts. And I can't really explain it... its like some cover/tribute band did it, but just didn't get it quite right...

Macs

At least in Windows GOG.com version, UW uses midi music by default. And in DOS era, Soundblaster was the most common sound card used, so you probably have used to that.

To fix this, you must conigure UW to use soundblaster for both sounds and music.

Unfortunately I am not sure how to easily configure the game to use Soundblaster (I am running it under Linux, but GOG.com version is running from cd image...). But, if you can find the game installation directory, there should be subdirectory DATA, and there is file UW.CFG. Change it to (remember to backup first):

4 -1 -1 -1 sound
2 -1 -1 -1 speech
0 cuts

And if that's not what you remember, it means your dad had a kickass Roland setup. That will take more work to set up.

I am using MUNT under linux to get pretty good GM emulation. But I have no idea how it will work under Mac.

Personally I though emulating a Roland card did more for the sound effects (which are pitifully weak with Soundblaster) than it did for the music.

True, without Roland emultation you get weak Soundblaster sounds or odd instrument sounds with ad lib. There is still a noticable difference in the music too though.

Thank you everyone for the advice and recommendations, but I am still suffering through the slightly off soundtrack (and one track that I don't recall at all that is so harsh and ear-raping that I draw my weapon just to switch it to the fighting soundtrack).

I have noticed that the footsteps noise and other effects have been replaced with keyboard notes, and I did read something about that in another forum... but still nothing that helps me as a mac user....

Any mac users out there have the answer?

-currently playing anyways, lvl6 is next, once Shak fixes up my armour!

Regarding piano foot steps, did you follow the advice in the first reply?

The thread I've pasted below has a lot of good tips, including on using Munt for MT/CM-32 emulation, and how to get use the sound effects samples rather than the instruments, as was happening to you.

https://www.gog.com/forum/ultima_series/sound_in_ultima_underworld_is_playing_music/page1

There's 6 pages of goodness here.