Harekiet wrote:

Hmm seemed to run here as a driver, just selected it in midi mapper and dosbox ran with it. Although sound was somewhat stuttery.

Try as I might, I can't get DosBox to recognize my driver. It defaults to the Microsoft Synthesizer on my laptop and I can't seem to do anything to change it. (I find this really, really weird as all other programs that use the default MIDI device find the emulator without any problems) What is your configuration?

Could it be that the SDL checks for certain device capabilities (I'd be surprised, but...)? Or maybe it's misconfigured (.ini ro SDL environment vars).

canadacow wrote:

Try as I might, I can't get DosBox to recognize my driver. It defaults to the Microsoft Synthesizer on my laptop and I can't seem to do anything to change it. (I find this really, really weird as all other programs that use the default MIDI device find the emulator without any problems) What is your configuration?

...

Working on the DosBox thing at the moment. As for the reverb, I have already coded the next release to allow you to tweak both the reverb settings (and disable it completely) and also adjust the sampling rate to improve performance. Thanks for the information with regard to my driver's operation!

The Genies laugh in QFG2 actually sounds rather silly even on a real MT-32. If you run it with the SoundBlaster driver you get a sampled laugh which sounds much better. Unfortunately you can't get sampled sound effects if you run with the MT-32 driver, so you have to choose between bad music and good effects (SB) or good music and not so good effects (MT-32).

(I think it's the same with the King's Quest I SCI Remake)

Same story with Betrayal at Krondor. 🙁 That one even has proper GM music, but with cheesy GM/GS sound effects.

Don't laugh, but I just tried the driver on my PIII-550 (running WinXP) with some DOS games (Indy: Fate of Atlantis, Dune 2) and DXDiag's MIDI test, and it was too much for my poor old CPU to handle (that is, it was very choppy and CPU utilization was at 100%).

I haven't been following canadacow's project or even VOGONS in general for the last couple of months, but now that I've stopped by to catch up a bit, I'm stoked about there now being a Windows driver. I can't wait for the ability to adjust the sampling rate - will that ability be enough for me to get audible music? Oh well - one more thing to look forward to enjoying when I'm able to get a new computer 😉

Thanks for all the hard work cc (and to anyone else who's helped)! I've been waiting for something like this for years, and it's now becoming a reality.

As for those old Sierra games, I also noticed that many support the MT-32 (or any external MIDI synth for that matter) or the Sound Blaster, but not both at the same time (only a few do). It would be cool if someone were to disassemble the old sound driver files and figure out how they work. From my own investigations, I'm pretty sure they're just libraries of functions written in assembly that the game loads into memory and calls (I seem to remember that the first thing they do is jump to different addresses depending on register values, and I saw tables of OPL instrument data in the Adlib and Sound Blaster drivers I looked at). Even better I suppose would be for someone to make fully-featured Windows-based SCI interpreters (they only have AGI ones now right? Haven't checked for a while).

As for those old Sierra games, I also noticed that many support the MT-32 (or any external MIDI synth for that matter) or the Sound Blaster, but not both at the same time (only a few do).

The only Sierra-games I can remember right away where you have to choose between sampled sound effects or MT-32 music is QFG2 and KQ1SCI. (There may be a couple more)

Almost none of the SCI0-games have any sampled sound effects at all (no soundblaster driver, just Adlib), and all the VGA (and SVGA) games have either a "Roland MT-32 Music with SoundBlaster Sound" driver or separate drivers for music and effects.
(The Amiga version of SQ3 does have some sampled effects, but the PC version hasn't got any as far as I know)

Even better I suppose would be for someone to make fully-featured Windows-based SCI interpreters

There is a SCI-interpretor for Windows (and Linux and others):
http://freesci.linuxgames.com
I haven't tried it much, so I don't know if it's any good. I was thinking of trying it with the MT-32 emulator, but I only have a Athlon 600, so it probably won't sound very good on my machine.

FreeSCI is quite excellent, although it doesn't run SCI1 games.

puttesnutte wrote:

The only Sierra-games I can remember right away where you have to choose between sampled sound effects or MT-32 music is QFG2 and KQ1SCI. (There may be a couple more)

Betrayal at Krondor comes to mind, and *maybe* Space Quest 4 (it's been a while - *waits for rabid readers to pounce on him with corrections*). Also, the PC version of SQ3 does have at least one sampled sound: Roger says something when he wakes up at the start of the game. You can only hear it if you substitute in a Soundblaster driver from a PC SCI game of the same era that does have digitized sounds (I think I may have used the driver from QFG2 or something like that). My guess is they used most of the same game data resources (graphics, sound, maps, etc.) in the Amiga and PC versions but didn't have the drivers in the PC version at the time to use the sampled sounds.

HunterZ wrote:

Also, the PC version of SQ3 does have at least one sampled sound: Roger says something when he wakes up at the start of the game. You can only hear it if you substitute in a Soundblaster driver from a PC SCI game of the same era that does have digitized sounds (I think I may have used the driver from QFG2 or something like that).

*blink* Really!? COOOOL. 😄

I sense sarcasm but I can't seem to triangulate it's exact origin...

Not sarcasm. If it was sarcasm it would be "oh, THAT'S cool, 🙄"

I finally downloaded and tested the MT-32 emulator driver!
Of course, since I only have a 600Mhz CPU, I got really choppy sound. But apart from the crackling and stuttering it sounds quite good! 😁

I got it to work with VDMSound and WinUAE, but DosBox just freezes. I also tried it with ScummVM and FreeSCI without any luck. I couldn't find any way to choose MIDI-device in ScummVM. It didn't even help changing the active device in windows sound properties. I really have no idea how ScummVM decides which device to use...
FreeSCI doesn't even recognize the MT-32 driver. It seems it can only use MCI-devices (whatever that is), so I guess the MT-32-driver isn't one.
And is there anyone out there who knows where you're supposed to put the config file for Freesci? In the readme it says you should put it in %WINDIR%\.freesci\ which doesn't work since you can't have folder names that start with a dot in windows. I also tried putting it in %WINDIR%\freesci\ and the freesci folder with no luck.

I also tried running SQ3 with the SoundBlaster driver from KQ1SCI and it worked! Cool! I had no idea you could do that. Maybe it works with more SCI0-games?

I found the .freesci folder in my homedir under Documents and Settings. Seems you can have foldernames that start with a dot after all. But I still don't know how to create a file or folder myself with a dot at the beginning...

puttesnutte wrote:

I really have no idea how ScummVM decides which device to use...

ScummVM relies on the Microsoft MIDI Mapper (that is, the MIDI device you set as default in the Sounds & Multimedia properties).

It also relies on SDL for its interface layer. Something that presently seems to have problems with my driver. I've almost got the problem resolved, however.

ScummVM relies on the Microsoft MIDI Mapper (that is, the MIDI device you set as default in the Sounds & Multimedia properties).

I tried that but it still sounded exactly the same as before.

You could always use a software loopback like MIDI-OX/MIDI-Yoke or Hubi's MIDI Loopback Cable to pass the data from a problem program to the MT-32 driver.

puttesnutte: Looks like we're in the game boat (PIII-550 here). We'll just have to wait until canadacow releases the next version, which will let us turn down the quality a little bit.

Actually I have a real MT-32, so I don't really need the emulator at all!
I just think it's interesting.
But some day my MT-32 might decide to call it quits. Hopefully I have a faster machine by then.

Kaminari wrote:

ScummVM relies on the Microsoft MIDI Mapper (that is, the MIDI device you set as default in the Sounds & Multimedia properties).

That is assuming you are using the windows midi driver of course (-e windows or whatever). If you want ScummVM to spit out midi for a MT-32 (or MT-32 emulator in this case) you should use the --native-mt32 command line option or the equivalent config file option; see the readme for further details.

Also of note is that a bunch of MT-32 related problems in ScummVM have been fixed recently, you'll probably be wanting to use a snapshot or a recent CVS checkout et cetera.