Wrong GM port?

sectoid wrote:

Wrong GM port?

The Mirosound sndindos.exe DOS utility tells me that General Midi is enabled at address 330h. That's the address I select inside Descent 2 setup.exe for General Midi. It doesn't fail, but I can't hear anything either. I've also tried 300h. Also, there's nothing else in the mobo apart from a graphics card, so there's plenty of available resources.

I assume you are using the onboard Wavetable.

in your descent .cfg file, what's the MidiDeviceID is referring to? Is it 0xa001 (GM)? Maybe you can change that to your card's DeviceID?

And/or change the MIDI port to your card's base port? ... (0x530, 0x604, 0xe80, 0xf40)

This is a wild guess though...

P.S. ... this is because i don't think you're using MPU-401 (330h or 300h) with the onboard wavetable, unless there is a GM emulator software loaded. Hex, i might be totally wrong...

Forget about that, it's spec'd as GM-compatible so it should work with standard GM setting. Now i wonder if that line "... Roland MPU-401 (Windows)" really meant that its MIDI support is Windows-only, have you tried other windows game with GM?

P.P.S. ... or is it just the MIDI IRQ? Sorry for the confusion... 😅

Sorry for you retro games 100, but the wavetable / mpu-401 support is windows only:

3.6 'MIDI / Gameport'


'MPU-401' steht nur fuer die miroSOUND PCM12 und PCM20 zur Verfuegung und aktiviert General MIDI fuer DOS.



3.7 'MPU Port'

MPU-401 Adresse fuer miroSOUND PCM12 und PCM20.

3.8 'MPU IRQ'



MPU-401 Interrupt fuer miroSOUND PCM12 und PCM20.

That's from the README.DEU file and it means that the mpu-401 / wavetable feature is only for the PCM12 and PCM20 cards. I have the PCM12 and it works. OPL3 and OPL4 sounds are really great, but Soundblaster Pro quality is horrible. This card is good if you need an additional card for Adlib/OPL4, GM and WSS support and can deactivate the SBPro port.
Maybe there is a third party driver / program that can activate the mpu-401in dos?

Thanks a lot for the explanations. 😀 I understand that the onboard wavetable ROM is not available under DOS for this "Pro1" card, but some later models do support DOS. (Actually, that sounds a little bit illogical from a design + release date point of view, but there you go!)

I will continue to hunt about for other onboard wavetable ISA soundcards, which provide funky tunes in old DOS games...

I remember Marek wrote this in the "Sound cards - from best to worst" topic:

Marek wrote:

source Then I got the Miro (I don't remember the model designation) with the OPL4. The hardware was acceptable. Soundblaster Pro compatibility was good. Biggest flaw was that you can't use the OPL4 wavetable with MPU401, and as I never saw a DOS game with OPL4 support, this makes it a Windows only feature. MPU401 is only available on the game port.
The real downside of this card was the driver, which apparently was written in BASIC and took about 10 seconds to initialize. And about 1 second every time Windows played a sample. In addition to that, it was quite buggy and most of the mixer sliders didn't work with any diver version. This is inacceptable. I sould the card to someone who didn't care.

I would expect the Opti 82C929 chip to be better at SB-Pro compatibility, as it was widely used on many cards at the time, including the T.B. Tropez Classic. But I never tried the chipset myself.

Very interesting. That definitely confirms things: no funky DOS tunes!

BTW, I do agree with Silent Loon's observation that "Soundblaster Pro quality is horrible". (For effects that is - I thought the SB-Pro music was perfectly OK.)

I did the testing in the original post above 10 years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy. Does it mean that the card, the Pro1 card, does not play General Midi music inside a "DOS box" within say Windows 95? When I mention DOS above, I wonder if I didn't try using a Windows "DOS box", or is that not likely to work anyway?

If it really is Windows only, as in not even inside a DOS box, then does anyone know what Windows games were released around 1994 that had good GM based music, because the card's PCB says (c) 1994. Thanks a lot.

That's correct. No OPL4 wavetable works in DOS or inside a DOS box in Win9x (for games, that is).

Concerning DOS, there's at least an OPL4 MIDI player..
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/44-voice-midi-on-yamaha-opl4/

@retrogames Nice to see you're back. :)

Thanks for the replies! I'm curious about what 'target market' the company was aiming this card at. The PCB says (c) 1994, when Windows 3 was around, but not Windows 95, which was in beta. But it's a card meant (I guess) "for Windows" - so does that mean Windows 3?