General Midi in Xcom games.

[khalbrae]

I know you've all recently helped me with a Might and Magic issue (and I am very grateful for that.) but I had managed to find and dig out my old Xcom UFO defense and Xcom Terror from the deep Cds and installed them. They work great. Just one minor snag.

Other games when I run them use my windows midi mapper when I set them to General Midi.. Xcom surprisingly doesn't. It's baffling. I want to hear what the game is "supposed" to roughly round like using the Yamaha XG software I got on sale

I mean, my version even has the sounds working in the intro video. The version that was recoded for Windows (which I also have with that retro issue of PC gamer from back in the day) even lacks those sounds.

Here's how it sounds normally with fm synth music. I don't want to record the general midi music but I DO want to listen to and enjoy it with a more symphonic and emersive feeling (though the FM synth is still pretty moody and creepy in the game).

[khalbrae]

Darn, I've only found one demo out there and it's a pre-release demo with only sound blaster and fm synth (and it was difficult to install properly).

[MiniMax]

Eh what? Please be brief. You install X-COM UFO Defense using DOSBox? You configure the game for General MIDI? And then what? What is missing? What is wrong? How do you know it is wrong?

[khalbrae]

the music does not play when configured to play on General Midi. In other DOS games (master of Magic, Warcraft 1 and 2, sierra games, etc) it plays via the windows midi system (in this case, my software synth)

[Qbix]

played with the mpu option ?

[khalbrae]

mpu option?

[Qbix]

Code: Select all

[midi]
#     mpu401: Type of MPU-401 to emulate.
#             Possible values: intelligent, uart, none.


[khalbrae]

hm... taking away the default options seems to make other games continue to work and xcom continue to fail...

uart or intelligent. change nothing
default,alsa,oss,win32,coreaudio all change nothing

I have no idea what I would put in device

[Qbix]

the first xcom seems to produce music fine at my place. when configured for general midi as music board.

Code: Select all

core=auto
cycles=auto limit 8000
cycleup=500
cycledown=20

and
memsize=32


[khalbrae]

is that "and" actually part of your .conf?

[MiniMax]

No.

[Freddo]

General Midi works fine for me in UFO: Enemy Unknown.

[khalbrae]

Odd... you're using Windows XP correct?

Wow... all I had to do was add the memsize=32

[khalbrae]

I have to say this game is a HELL of a lot less creepy with general midi. The music sounds a lot less alien and instead of having strange creepy vibration effects, we have long drawn out but normal sounding strings. Disappointing but worth seeing. The Geoscape music does sound pretty good though

[sectoid]

I think X-COM music was originally written for Roland cards and General MIDI support came with a later patch.

[robertmo]

Qbix: mobygames says xcom requires 4MB memory

Why memsize=32 is needed??

[eL_PuSHeR]

I think it's because protected mode games may benefit from a larger amount of memory.

[wd]

Even pmode games rarely need 4+ mb and only two or three games require
more than the default, so this is specific to this game if at all.

[h-a-l-9000]

The games might not have to swap out memory though.

[wd]

If your OS can't cache 12mb you should consider a different OS.