The Civilization Jukebox

[Lord_Hill]

Have you ever wanted to listen to your Civilization DOS music at your leisure without having to rely on recordings? Apparently enough people did in the 90s that Microprose created an application called 'Civilization Jukebox'. Surprisingly, we didn't already have this one buried in the CivFanatics vaults so I went digging and managed to grab it from a copy of the Microprose FTP site on Wayback.

It's a rather charming little program, you can choose whether you want Adlib, Speaker, Tandy or Roland MT32 sound and it gives you a little menu to change tracks. You can also amusingly choose 'no sound card' and you get a funny message questioning what you're doing! Of course these days there are many ways to get at that soundtrack, this is just a nice little piece of Civ history it works fine on DOSBox as well, including MT32 playback using MUNT.

 

[darkpanda]

Thanks for this great upload !

So I started to tinker around with it, very quickly.

First thing to notice is that it can almost run on its own, it only needs to have the necessary *SOUND.CVL drivers next to it to be able to play back game musics. No need for any other CIV files.

Second thing : the available playback drivers are hardcoded in the CIVJUKE.EXE menu, so by default it cannot play back sound with the General MIDI sound driver that was provided later on in tthe CIVSND patch (file name GSOUND.CVL).
Of course this is just theory, and you can simply overwrite any of the supported drivers (for example ASOUND.CVL for AdLib/SoundBlaster) with the contents of GSOUND.CVL, and then when selecting "AdLib/SoundBlaster" in CIVJUKE, it will actually be playing music through the General MIDI driver - as simple as that !

For reference, the 1994 sound driver patch provided by MPS Labs, was posted on these forums by @hornpipe2 : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civdos-additional-sound-drivers.549674/

 

[darkpanda]

Who would have thought DOSBox can natively capture MIDI events as MID files ?

Not me, after installed various virtual MIDI drivers and other XP-era tools, until searching dosbox.conf for "midi" and finding this line:

...
# captures: Directory where things like wave, midi, screenshot get captured.
...

Apparently the DOSBox documentation is quite explicit too:

So, here we go !

 

[darkpanda]

Playing those songs through VirtualMIDISynth and the "Timbres of Heaven" soundfont is just EPIC... In particular the opening theme, I never realized how ominous and grandiose it sounded before !

I wonder if I can make a WAV or MP3 out of it, but if you have the time to set it up, I highly recommend a go

VirtulaMIDISynth: https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

Timbres of Heaven: https://midkar.com/soundfonts/index.html (direct download link at the bottom: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-cwBWZIYYTxFwzcWFaoGA7Kjx5SEjVAa/view?usp=drivesdk )

Still recording those MIDs at the moment.

 

[darkpanda]

It's done, in the attached ZIP I manually captured the 18 songs available through the Jukebox, using General MIDI driver and DOSBox capture.

Added note: most songs are playef in an auto-loop, so they are aburptly cut where I stopped the playback manually, and didn't bother to tailer the MID files afterwards, hence the "raw" label

 

[Lord_Hill]

That's great, glad my Internet searching led to something so fun

 

[Lord_Hill]

Another way to do it is to use VLC Media Player to play the mid files (you can configure it to load a sound font for midi playback via FluidSynth). The intro does sound suitably epic with Timbers of Heaven. As does the 'lose' music funnily enough.

 

[Blake00]

Wow.. I didn't know dosbox could record midi's either.. I'll have to remember that as that could be very useful for other things I do.
Thanks for creating these midi's this is exactly what I was looking for!

 

[darkpanda]

Another way to do it is to use VLC Media Player to play the mid files (you can configure it to load a sound font for midi playback via FluidSynth). The intro does sound suitably epic with Timbers of Heaven. As does the 'lose' music funnily enough.

Quite surprised by the heaviness of Russians song too... But disappointed overall by tunes for Mongols and Indians (percussions only) and Indians (sounds weird, could've been much more melodic)

 

[rahorvat]

Bravo That's great guys. Will look into it later.

 

[darkpanda]

By the way, I was just trying some Civ games with MIDI soundbanks, and it should be noted that many game sounds are NOT playable in the Jukebox, eventhough they are clearly MIDI : battle sounds, music when encointering an opponent, Love The President day, etc...

 

[Lord_Hill]

This MicroProse archive is a gold mine. I noticed that the English music sounded badly wrong in adlib mode (missing the actual tune, only playing the bass). Turns out MicroProse fixed that in a separate patch which I grabbed from the same archive. Replace your asound.cvl with this one to get proper adlib playback in the jukebox and the game.

 

[hornpipe2]

This MicroProse archive is a gold mine. I noticed that the English music sounded badly wrong in adlib mode (missing the actual tune, only playing the bass). Turns out MicroProse fixed that in a separate patch which I grabbed from the same archive. Replace your asound.cvl with this one to get proper adlib playback in the jukebox and the game.

You might try the 486snd.zip file, which is an even newer version of Adlib sound driver that does both the mono vs stereo fix (as in civasnd.zip), but also includes a fix for playback on faster machines. Here's portions of the README from the archive (note that it includes drivers for other games too, I've bolded the relevant info for Civ)

Fast 486 Sound Driver Updates

The AdLib drivers (for AdLib, Sound Blaster, Pro Audio Spectrum, Covox and
compatibles) of some of our older games have had problems with newer fast
computers, especially 486/66s. This file contains a number of updated sound
drivers that should work fine on all fast machines.

BEFORE UPDATING YOUR SOUND DRIVERS, PLEASE RENAME OR OTHERWISE BACKUP YOUR
OLD DRIVERS! Go to your game directory and type DIR ASOUND.*, this will show
you the AdLib drivers used. In most cases, there will only be one driver.
Some games also used a separate one for the logo screen. Copy the
corresponding updated driver(s) to your game directory and start the game as
you normally would. Newer games not listed here should work fine as is on
fast computers.

ASOUND.CVL Civilization (for DOS) *
ASOUND.117 F117A Stealth Fighter 2.0 *
ASOUND.F15 F15 Strike Eagle II
ASOUND.F19 F19 Stealth Fighter
ASOUND.LOG Logo (used in some openings)
ASOUND.KN Knights of the Sky
ASOUND.RR Railroad Tycoon
ASOUND.RSR Red Storm Rising
ASOUND.SAM Sword of the Samurai
ASOUND.SS Silent Service II
ASOUND.TNK M1 Tank Platoon

* Also fixes stereo problems with newer Pro model (OPL-3) sound cards that
had only been playing one channel.


Also available from the MPS Sound Department:

* Roland MT-32 updates for F19, F15 II, M1 Tank and Red Storm Rising

* Coming soon: Native (OPL-3) Pro boards sound drivers for Civ/DOS
General MIDI drivers for Civ/DOS and Pirates! GOLD

...

Enjoy!

Jim McConkey, MPS Sound Guru
4.Feb.1994

(the "coming soon: native" drivers are obviously those in the civsnd.zip "additional sound drivers" archive mentioned above)

 

[Lord_Hill]

Good stuff. Funny, because the computer I played this on back in the day (Win 95 / DOS era) never suffered from any of these issues. I can only assume I had an old enough sound card to avoid the bug altogether, which is lucky because I wouldn't have known what an ftp was back in 91

 

[Vaximillian]

Looks like I’ll finally be able to hear Civ 1 music for the first time (despite having played on and off since 2002-ish). Glorious