Wing Commander 3 Free on Origin

Anybody allready found a fix for the Rolands/GUS-support? the game's music sounded (a lot) better in the old days.
 
Anybody allready found a fix for the Rolands/GUS-support? the game's music sounded (a lot) better in the old days.
Not sure what you mean. Rolland Sound Canvas and RAP-10 are a very different beast then the Gravis Ultrasound. GUS emulation works just fine in dosbox. Set gus=true, put the ULTRASND driver folder (available around) in your mounted c drive. set ultradir=c:\ULTRASND, and launch with the wc3gus.bat or whatever it is called on the cd (dunno if this bat is included on the origin version, haven't actually tried it). Then you have to set the soundcard irq/dma stuff in the first time running setup program of course. Dosbox doesn't emulate those Roland cards directly and just relays general midi stuff to the OS to take care of. You can use whatever General Midi device you want whether softsynth or actual hardware.

Why does this excite me so? I already own this game six times over!

I know what you mean. I got a MacOS classic version, dos, gog and now Origin :)
 
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@Chris

Sometimes these sorts of deals can vary from region to region, so let us know where else it works for you outside the US

Feedback: also available for free in germany.

I tell it Arrow, so he can write a news about that. WC3 and WCS belong together. :) Thx for the news.
 
Not sure what you mean.
The version provided by Origin makes the music sound "weak", and differs a lot from the dosbox I set up myself. And it's a completely different installation routine from standard setup, all CD's are packed in a 1.8GB file called data.dat. Pretty sure I can get it to work properly, but why default to something that sounds poort, when you can provide music that sounds as good as in the FMV sequences?
 
The version provided by Origin makes the music sound "weak", and differs a lot from the dosbox I set up myself. And it's a completely different installation routine from standard setup, all CD's are packed in a 1.8GB file called data.dat. Pretty sure I can get it to work properly, but why default to something that sounds poort, when you can provide music that sounds as good as in the FMV sequences?

GOG's version of WC3 is the same way it sounds. With the GOG version you can rename data.dat as data.iso and open it like any other disk image.
 
The Origin twitter account reports that the intention is to give WC3 away for free in countries including Russia, South Africa and the rest of the world, but there was some sort of snag that they are trying to overcome now.

Also, this is pretty funny! https://twitter.com/OriginInsider/status/496819986628096000
I'm not familiar with social media, but I find that conversation a bit cringe-inducing. Well, I suppose I'll give them credit for trying to be friendly.

I installed EA Origin for the first time and tried downloading WC3, but I get an instant failure. The same happens for the one other game that I had to use the old EA Downloader a few years back. Has anyone else had this issue? A quick search yielded a lot of complaints about this but not much in the way of solutions.

Regarding WC3 sound, it's been a while since I've played it, but I don't recall having music as nice as the FMV - it was all basic MIDI as I recall. But then, I only ever played the original DOS version... don't remember if I got around to playing the KS version, or if I did, whether there was much difference in sound quality.
 
The version provided by Origin makes the music sound "weak", and differs a lot from the dosbox I set up myself.
I bet their default wc3 install is set to run off of the soundblaster 16 emulation. No it's not the best sounding option, (particularly if you hate fm synthesis) But it's easy to change yourself. Trash you wc3.conf in the mounted cdrive and select something else. They did it because it's reliable, as everyone's midi setup is different and the GUS drivers are not free.

I myself have a liking for the Timbre's of Heaven soundfont.
 
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Simple guide to getting in-flight music to sound as you remember from the days of old.

Download and unzip the attached file, insert it into the 'game\wc3' folder, overwriting the config file that's already sitting there.

For me, the path is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\Wing Commander III\Game\Game\WC3.

You may lose your old saved games, I don't know if this happened when I was tinkering or as a result of this fix.

That is all.
 

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@-danr-
what exactly does that wc3.conf do out of curiosity? Saying that it makes it sound like the old days doesn't mean much to me. Many of us in the old days had soundblaster/compatible cards :) Which is the origin/gog default.
 
I installed EA Origin for the first time and tried downloading WC3, but I get an instant failure. The same happens for the one other game that I had to use the old EA Downloader a few years back. Has anyone else had this issue? A quick search yielded a lot of complaints about this but not much in the way of solutions.
I discovered that Origin downloads from akamai.cdn.ea.com, and I had akamai blocked at the router level as it is often used as an advertising service. Only very rarely do I have a problem with that - looks like this is one of those rare times.
 
You may lose your old saved games, I don't know if this happened when I was tinkering or as a result of this fix.

As long as you're not overwriting the .wsg files, your save games should be okay (back those up if you want to be extra sure).
 
@-danr-
what exactly does that wc3.conf do out of curiosity? Saying that it makes it sound like the old days doesn't mean much to me. Many of us in the old days had soundblaster/compatible cards :) Which is the origin/gog default.

I'm not entirely sure of the file's function but I assume its a config file with installation settings. :)

What I do know is this: Back in the day I played WC3 with Soundblaster/compatibles - and the in-flight music from my CD copy differs hugely from that of this latest Origin release. The music in this version sounds - how do I put it...? Tinny, almost 8-bit at times.

Transferring the .conf file from my CD install of WC3 seems to enable the much richer in-flight music.
 
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I'm not entirely sure of the file's function but I assume its a config file with installation settings. :)

Transferring the .conf file from my CD install of WC3 seems to enable the much richer in-flight music.

There's two different files in question here. You posted a .cfg, not a .conf. I believe the .cfg is the file the installer creates when you select your sound card. You can manually launch and set this (even in the GOG/Origin version) by changing the game's shortcut (or using command line) to start the game with "wc3 -i". Separately, you may also need to change the DOSBox .conf file, which changes which soundcard you want DOSBox to emulate, so that it matches what is set in the installer.
 
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