Sam & Max Hit the Road is a fantastic adventure game, and every now and then I find myself drawn back to this classic. Recently, I wanted to play it on a system that is a bit more modern for the game: a Pentium 200 setup with a Sound Blaster 16 and a wavetable board for General MIDI.
Like other LucasArts adventures, Sam & Max supports General MIDI in addition to OPL FM, so I wanted to give it a try. However, as soon as you switch to General MIDI and start the game, the screen remains black. I tested several versions of the game, but they all behaved the same way. The error did not occur on older systems though as the game works just fine using General MIDI on my 486 PC.
The solution, as is often the case, was finally found in a thread on VOGONS. Just this year, a user by the name of TgamesFR provided a fix for this exact problem. It resolves the crashing issues when using General MIDI in Star Wars: Dark Forces, Sam & Max Hit the Road and Star Wars TIE Fighter.
I swapped out the files in the installation folder, and lo and behold: the game’s music played in beautiful General MIDI quality. In my case, I experienced some crackling sound effects under Windows 95, but those disappeared completely in DOS mode.
Now I can enjoy this adventure gem on my faster retro systems as well.
You can find the download for the fixes here:
Tgames.fr
UNBIT Mirror