First post, by I4ko
Last couple of days, after 0.70 was released I've been trying everything I could think of to make megaem work. I need a gm/mt32 emulation, with virtualy zero cpu consumption. 0.70 works like a charm in general - 10k cycles with 44100 hz on all sound mixers, super2xsai, and no frameskip is using just 3-5% cpu. Both under linux and windows.
Using mt32emu or timidity is no option - constant cpu load on 100% and sound shuttering.
So I decided to use the gus gm/mt32 emulation. However megaem requires VCPI (which must have been around in dosbox since 0.65) but is unable to find it (xms, ems, umb = true).
Running dosbox with xms and ems=false and emb=true/false and booting a dos 6.22 image was a little better - however EMM386 was not able to use framebuffer, even in frame E000 it complains of a rom there. Megaem loads but in convensional mem, since it complains it cannot find emm manger, but is able to find vcpi provided by EMM386 - very strange. (It doesn't matter if I use dos's HIMEM or internal dosbox).
Tried with qemm - no luck at all - qemm does not load.
Disk images are very incovenient so I took the DEVICE.COM from qemm and with it I can load himem.sys and emm386.exe (4.45 or 4.95) (either with frame e000 or with noframe) if autoexec section. However megaem still compains I have no emm installed and runs in convensional mem.(Very stange again since EMM386 is the VCPI provider).
EMM386 however list ems memory fine, but dosbox's mem also says there is no ems memory. I've tryed with memory set to 4,8,16 and 63 mb.
I waht to push this to the limits, so either:
1. DOSBOX provides VCPI.
2. EMM386 (or other ems manger) is able to load and work as supposed.
NMI are not needed since I only want to use megaem for midi, nmi are needed only for sb emulation, which we already have.
I am open to any suggestions since I would like to make use of this low power cpu method of gm/mt32 emulation.