These are recordings of the Transport Tycoon and Transport Tycoon Deluxe soundtrack in the version for Roland MT-32 and compatible synthesizers. The MT-32 version is rather different from the General MIDI/SoundCanvas version, it has a more mellow sound with some very well chosen instruments, and custom patches.
This recording was made on January 30th 2020 on a Roland RA-50, see below for more technical details.
The following files are in Ogg Vorbis format, which most music players should support.
To make this recording, the unmodified DOS version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and Transport Tycoon with Scenario Editor, was used. The game was run under MS DOS 7.0 (Windows 95 booted directly to DOS) on a Via C3 533 MHz.
The MIDI output was via the gameport MPU-401 interface on an AOpen AW744 card (Yamaha DS-XG chipset), under DOS this requires PCI PnP initialisation via a non-TSR utility. To fully support the RA-50 synth, SoftMPU 1.9.1 was loaded with the /RA50 option. While the SoftMPU utility is not required as such for Transport Tycoon to play music on MT-32, it is required for the RA-50 "Realtime Arranger" device, as Roland for some reason did not implement the standard MIDI message "all notes off". SoftMPU has an emulation of that message. Without that, stopping, changing track, or going to/from the main menu, will typically result in hanging notes.
MIDI output from the gameport MPU-401 interface was passed directly to the RA-50 "sequencer in" port, and the synth was switched off and back on before starting the game. No settings on the synth were changed before or during recording.
Stereo output was the RA-50 passed to a Behringer UMC204HD USB audio interface, and recorded as a single session into Audacity running on a modern Windows PC. The recording was performed at 44.1 kHz 16 bit resolution, with levels adjusted so the general peak was around -6 dB. After recording, the individual tunes were extracted and exported to one file each. Metadata were applied with foobar 2000.
The Roland RA-50 "Realtime Arranger" is a band-in-a-box type device based on the same synthesizer as the Roland MT-32, but with extra features to allow a single musician with a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI instrument to get accompaniment of rhythm and bass by just playing a melody. It has two pairs of MIDI inputs and outputs, one for "keyboard" and one for "sequencer": The MIDI input given on the "keyboard" input is used as basis for the accompainment, while input on the "sequencer" port is just rendered as-is.