PeterLI wrote:

Enjoy! ES is a long flight from RU! 😀 I never knew Tolstoy was buried in your home town: very interesting.

Not very long, flight from Moscow to Barcelona takes somewhat like 4-5 hours depending on weather conditions. Tolstoy is buried in Yasnaya Polyana, not in Tula itself but some 10 miles away. I'm surprised someone knows Tolstoy outside Russia.

bristlehog wrote:

I'm surprised someone knows Tolstoy outside Russia.

There are many famous writers who are known worldwide, like Hemingway, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Jul Verne, Aleksandr Dumas, Mark Twein, etc.
Tolstoy - one of these writers, so not be wrong to say that people everywhere had heard about him.

easy_john wrote:

bristlehog wrote:

I'm surprised someone knows Tolstoy outside Russia.

There are many famous writers who are known worldwide, like Hemingway, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Jul Verne, Aleksandr Dumas, Mark Twein, etc.
Tolstoy - one of these writers, so not be wrong to say that people everywhere had heard about him.

Hello! American here, versed in some world literature classics, and yes, don't worry, Tolstoy is internationally famous. 😀

ASC Media Master driver (MMSYNTH.ADV) has been successfully tested. It has some issues, but I can't really do anything about it since there's no source code, no SDK and the only one driver version is seen in all the games I know of. Disassembling is beyond me and anyway I don't know what to look for if even I could disassemble the driver.

There is an "end of line" (eol) issue in DEFDRV.INI when read by PX player. PX is essentially looking for a mac-like style end of line character sequence. Attached is an archive of dos2mac to help convert an edited DEFDRV.INI file to a PX readable format. From Windows, run: dos2mac DEFDRV.INI.

Archive from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cs-cmdtools/f … DOS2Mac%20v1.0/.

This method does not work every time. The best method is to use VIM to convert to a mac style eol.

Also, is px player capable of stereo?

very cool little program. Small question: do you intend to provide the source code for it? I have some improvements that I'd like to implement. Also, what do you use to compile this, Watcom?

Oops, missed everything. If somebody still wants source code, contact me via private messaging. It's compiled with Turbo C++ 1.0.

Hey bristlehog, I just sent you a PM.

Regards
-Darkstar

I've sent PX Player source code to Darkstar along with a blessing to pass it to any other willing developer should they appear.

x86++ wrote:

There is an "end of line" (eol) issue in DEFDRV.INI when read by PX player. PX is essentially looking for a mac-like style end o […]
Show full quote

There is an "end of line" (eol) issue in DEFDRV.INI when read by PX player. PX is essentially looking for a mac-like style end of line character sequence. Attached is an archive of dos2mac to help convert an edited DEFDRV.INI file to a PX readable format. From Windows, run: dos2mac DEFDRV.INI.

Archive from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cs-cmdtools/f … DOS2Mac%20v1.0/.

This method does not work every time. The best method is to use VIM to convert to a mac style eol.

Also, is px player capable of stereo?

I don't have such an issue with EOL neither in Dosbox, nor with real hardware.

PX Player is capable of stereo to the extent of used sound driver. Some sound drivers are incapable of stereo, e.g. SBFM.DRV; but most of supplied drivers have stereo.

I have a PCI ESS Solo-1 1938, and I get an error "Failed to open driver auddrvfm.ad" in MS-DOS.

Does auddrvfm only work with the older ISA ESS sound cards?

Adlib.adv, Sbp2fm.adv, and wss.adv work though in px. I just wanted to hear if auddrvfm uses ESFM.

AIL drivers have 'ADV' extension, not 'AD' - which is an extension for Adlib instrument bank. Are you sure you're using correct driver filename?

px is working now with auddrvfm. Something must have been wrong with the devdrv.ini I was using. I used one that was included in the px109 zip file and after replacing adlib with auddrvfm, success.

bristlehog wrote:

MT32SB.ADV - Roland MT-32 and compatibles via Sound Blaster MPU interface (NOT TESTED YET)
..
Note to XT users: PX *should* be XT-compatible, however, that has not been really tested yet.

I tested it on an 8088 at 4.77 MHz with a Roland Juno-D connected to a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 MIDI interface.
The program works, except for three things:
1) It doesn't play the MIDI fast enough, the tempo is generally too slow, and slows down further when more notes are played, I hear it improving when I switch to the 8 MHz turbo mode, so I suppose the code is too slow for a 4.77 MHz system.
2) My device is a GM2 device, not MT-32 compatible, so the instruments were wrong.
3) MIDIFORM doesn't want to convert any MIDI file that has more than 32 notes playing at the same time.

Could you make a driver for the SB interface, but with General MIDI support?
And is there a way to support more than 32 notes, or is that a limitation of XMI? If so, could MIDIFORM be changed so that it just drops the oldest note and plays the rest?

If you're really interested in supporting MIDI on an 8088, I've developed a routine that preprocesses a MIDI file so that it can be played in realtime even at 4.77 MHz, without even needing to quantize the MIDI data down at all (I noticed MIDIFORM quantizes down to 120 Hz, which is quite 'lossy').

I doubt I can quickly make a GM-through-SB driver, since I got no source code neither for MT32SB.ADV nor for GENMIDI.ADV. It is still possible - one needs to find SB and General MIDI programming manual and make corresponding changes to MT32MPU.ADV source code. But that's not going to be an easy task, at least for me.

I couldn't find whether 32 notes is a hard limitation or just a soft limit used to reflect the maximum hardware capability of appropriate times (MT-32 has 32 simultaneous notes). However, I can recompile MIDIFORM lifting this limit, and we'll see if it's output still works.

The 120 Hz quantization, on the other side, cannot be removed, since it's the intrinsic quality of XMIDI and AIL. It was put there to reduce number of required MIDI events thus greatly diminishing the size of XMIDI compared to it's MIDI counterpart. All the driver system relies on 120 Hz quantization, and I can do nothing about it.

Thanks for this fantastic program !

I'd like to share with you a little trick I just found out while trying to play Hi-Octane music for AWE32:
(maybe some of you already knew it, anyway)

Since the game uses ROM samples, the playback is incorrect unless they're uploaded to the card, but there's no such feature in PX.

So while playing with the AWE32 installation CD, I found the AWE32 Control Panel, which allows to upload SBKs to the card.

Make sure that you upload it to the card from the 'Synth' tab, because doing so from the 'User' tab requires MIDI CC messages to be sent for the card to switch to the correct bank:

(this is the utility running in Windows 3.1)

Now PX plays the music exactly the way it should be 😀

(I believe the same trick could be applied for other brands of audio cards, providing they have the same sort of utility)

bristlehog wrote:

It turns out that this driver doesn't support any configuration (it effectively ignores any config parameters passed). Thus, only default configuration is supported

I found this quote from 4 years ago, and I think this applies to the SBP2FM driver as well? I made a SBP2FM.CFG in the same directory as SBP2FM.ADV, and when I run the command "PX DEMO.XMI SBP2FM.ADV" it ignores the I/O address I put in SBP2FM.CFG and fails to initialize.

- TANDY.ADV - Tandy 1000 3-voice speaker

is it possible to also add a Driver Supporting Lo-Tech and SN76489 and the MonsterFM Sound Card ?
its only needed to modifiy the TANDY.ADV to also support Tandy 3 Voice on 2C0 and 1E0h Adresss.

And maybe Support for the TNDLPT 3-Voice Parallelport Sound Device ? its possible to send you one if you willing to add support to your player 😀

Thank you

Matthias

matze79 wrote:

is it possible to also add a Driver Supporting Lo-Tech and SN76489 and the MonsterFM Sound Card ?
its only needed to modifiy the TANDY.ADV to also support Tandy 3 Voice on 2C0 and 1E0h Adresss.

Yeah, its very simple. New .ADV drivers for 2c0 and 1e0 ports in attachment. For automatic build this drivers i include modified SPKR.INC and TND.MAK from AIL2 (miles sound system).

matze79 wrote:

And maybe Support for the TNDLPT 3-Voice Parallelport Sound Device ? its possible to send you one if you willing to add support to your player 😀

I need more information about TNDLPT. For example, circuit.

Thank you very much, i will test it 😀

i send you a Schematic, we also can send you a real Device for testing.