Any reason not to default Roland to CM-32L?

[rhester72]

Since it's a newer ROM base than MT-32 v1.07, has SFX and is (ostensibly) fully backwards-compatible with the MT-32, is there any reason not to default mt32-pi to the CM-32L (if not as part of the distribution, at least for personal usage)?

[nswaldman]

The MT-32 is the baseline configuration because it's more commonly known and more supported in old games. I can see why the "extra bells on" version isn't the default ROM.

I may confuse what you're trying to say with the "at least for personal usage" bit, because if you want to be able to set your own copy of mt32-pi up to always start up in CM-32L mode, that's already possible. You can either:

1. Copy only your CM-32L ROM to your SD card
2. Force mt32-pi to prefer the CM-32L rom by changing the rom_set value in mt32-pi.cfg (by default it scans for old, then new and finally cm32l)
3. Use the custom SysEx messages to cycle through the ROM sets manually

[rhester72]

What I was really asking about was compatibility - perhaps a better way I could have asked would have been "are there any games known that work properly with MT-32 but not CM-32L?". By 'personal usage', I was suggesting that you can't necessarily assume a user has a set of CM-32L ROMs to put on the card in the first place.

[dwhinham]

It depends what games you play - you basically just want to use this list and decide which of the games with version-specific quirks you play the most: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games#IBM_PC_compatibles

As a rule of thumb, "new" can be pretty much ignored; it was the last ROM set to gain support in Munt and it's functionally the same as CM-32L minus extra sounds. It's present in Munt mostly for completion; in practice you don't need it.

The reasons for switching between "old" and CM-32L will mainly be because some games "exploit software bugs of MT-32 (Old) modules' firmware; will on some occasions sound wrong on later-generation modules" (from one of the notes underneath the table linked above).

So what I'd recommend is:

• Use MT-32 "old" if the game has "old" quirks.
• Use CM-32L for everything else.

Hope this helps 🙂

[rhester72]

It does - thank you!