So the DOS version of X-COM was originally intended to be played with a Roland CM-32 synth, as many people have noted when pointing out that there's supposed to be a siren sound at the beginning of the intro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuRzCHaeyXYFor those of us who do not have a CM-32 (I have an MT-32, which does not support the siren sound but does otherwise reproduce most of the music correctly) there's a pretty good open-source MT-32/CM-32 emulator available named Munt:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/munt/In case anyone else is crazy enough to want to get this working with OpenXcom, here's how I was able to do it on Windows:
- Download and install Munt. If you're on 64-bit Windows, also download and install the amd64 driver.
- Configure Munt for CM-32 mode. This involves acquiring CM-32 ROMs, which I cannot link because redistribution is a legal grey area.
- Configure Windows to use Munt as the default Windows MIDI device. There are a number of MIDI device chooser utilities out there that can do this.
- In your OpenXcom data/SOUND folder, rename GM.CAT to something else.
- Download the xcom14_roland.zip file from this post: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=166565#p166565
- Now unpack the ROLAND.CAT file from xcom14_roland.zip to an empty folder, rename it to GM.CAT, and put it in your OpenXcom data/SOUND folder.
- Run OpenXcom and configure it to use MIDI as the music mode.
Now when you run OpenXcom, you should hear the siren and the awesome CM-32 music! My only nitpick is that the sound is way louder than the music.
