- What OS are you using?
- Have you got other programs running natively in your OS to play music through the MT-32?

I've been thinking about buying an MT-32 and a Sound Canvas from eBay to use with DOSBox, so I'm curious to know how well it can work.

DOSBox .63 works beautifully with my MT-32. Let me suggest the obvious, are you sure you are going from the MIDI out of your sound card to the MIDI in of the MT-32? Do you have audio output of the MT-32 going back to the audio in of your sound card or an amplifier?

You also need to set your OS to use your sound card's MIDI output as the default MIDI device on your system before running DOSBox.

He said he set his MIDI playback to MPU-401, though I suppose he might of meant in the DOSBox.conf file.

He may have meant in the game he was testing with inside of DOSBox. He should set win32 in his dosbox.conf I think?

collector wrote:

He said he set his MIDI playback to MPU-401, though I suppose he might of meant in the DOSBox.conf file.

I set my MIDI playback to MPU-401 in the control panel of Windows XP. Do I need to change a setting in the DOSBox config file?

What is the current setting? Also, what setting are you using in whatever game you're testing with?

Also, before you tackle DOSBox you should first try running dxdiag (start->run->dxdiag) and run a MIDI test on that "MPU-401" port and see if Windows itself works with your MT-32. Note that if it works, it will sound terrible because it's a General MIDI song.

You don't have to configure anything in dosbox (default settings)

1. If you DON'T set mpu-401 in windows control panel (i.e. leave default driver), does the game play music?
If yes, problem is in windows or mpu-401. If no, problem is most likely in dosbox.
In the latter case, try lowering CPU cycles because some games send data too quickly to MPU-401 and dosbox doesn't check for buffer overflow.

2. Try also playing a midi file with media player while driver is set to mpu-401,
It should probably produce music on MT32(edit:I see HunterZ also suggested it)

HunterZ wrote:

What is the current setting? Also, what setting are you using in whatever game you're testing with?

Also, before you tackle DOSBox you should first try running dxdiag (start->run->dxdiag) and run a MIDI test on that "MPU-401" port and see if Windows itself works with your MT-32. Note that if it works, it will sound terrible because it's a General MIDI song.

The setting in DOSBox in set at default... I did the dxdiag test and I didn't hear music from my Module. So there is no connection being made from my computer to my MT-32. In the game I am trying to play (King's quest 6)
it says that I can use the Roland MT-32 feature. But no messages are sent to my module.

Yes, it seems that there is either:
- a hardware problem, such as a connection problem between your sound card and MT-32 (maybe you connected to the wrong port on your PC or to the wrong port on your MT-32?), or
- a software problem, such as old sound card drivers

You'll definitely want to get that working before you throw DOSBox into the equation.

Also, KQ6 reports MT-32 as available because it sees DOSBox's emulated/virtual MPU-401 port. However, KQ6 doesn't actually know whether or not you have anything connected to that virtual MPU-401 port.