That is normal behaviour. The AWE doesn't have General MIDI compatibility.

You can enable General MIDI support through the driver, but it works poorly under pure DOS, better from within Windows.

Yes, by default it goes out the game port. Just connect an external General MIDI device and you are set.

I don't have any general MIDI device to connect there, or else I'd have tried...

so is there no way via software to redirect the output to the speakers ?

I do have Windows 3.1 in there aswell, if that's any useful.

What games are you playing?

Some games, like Doom or Duke 3D support the AWE directly. Just select the AWE option in the setup menu.

Yes, I indeed use AWE32 in those games, but I also have other games that support General MIDI, SoundBlaster and AdLib as Music output, but not AWE32 and soundblaster and adlib as music sound quite... meh.....

Elia1995 wrote:

Basically I can't get MIDI music to play through the speakers, no matter what port I use, 320 or 330

this implies you have a midi device attached to the joystick port.

The EMU8000 uses port 620 etc.

MIDI uses uses port 330

if no midi device (roland sound canvas, yamaha mu, etc) no sound. pretty simple.

I'll try to get a gameport to round (midi out and midi in) cable (if I can still find any... I hope so) and connect my MIDI keyboard (which is the only MIDI device I own at the moment) to experiment with midi output from the sound card...

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

That is normal behaviour. The AWE doesn't have General MIDI compatibility.

You can enable General MIDI support through the driver, but it works poorly under pure DOS, better from within Windows.

Yes, by default it goes out the game port. Just connect an external General MIDI device and you are set.

I was about to try MIDI on my AWE64 this weekend, so I'm kind of interested in this topic. Aren't you supposed to just run AWEUTIL /EM:GM?

The caveat here is that AWE32/64 (and the topic starter's SB32) won't work in protected mode games under pure DOS — though a lot of those have native AWE32 support, like in DOOM and its clones, Build-based games and so on.

I didn't know about that aweutil command, do I have to use it before executing any game ?

For AWE based sound cards, applications and games are expected to use the EMU8000 chip directly (via the default port of 620h).
However, for games that didn't support the EMU8000 synthesis chip natively, Creative wrote a tsr called AWEUTIL.
AWEUTIL uses Non Maskable Interrups (NMI's) to "catch" I/O events on port 330h (the standard MIDI port), and then reroutes them to the EMU8000 synthesis chip.
This works only with Real Mode games, but not every one.

Therefore, Real Mode DOS games requires Aweutil to initialise your sound card's General MIDI mode (with the /EM:GM parameter).
You would then choose General MIDI in the game's setup menu (under the music option).
Just an additional note: For the above mentioned MPU-401 AWEUTIL emulation to work, the card MUST have the "MFBEN" jumper (JP4) set as this is responsible for generating NMI's.

In order to hear General MIDI sounds with Protected Mode games (games that load a DOS extender like DOS/4GW), it must support the AWE32/AWE64 natively (i.e., directly in hardware) and doesn't actually require Aweutil (you can then just load Aweutil with the /s parameter to initialise the EMU8000 chipset).
You would then normally choose AWE32 (not General MIDI) in the game's setup menu under the music option.
Unfortunately, with this option, you're stuck with the standard 1 MB General MIDI ROM sample set that is on the sound card (and some of the instruments, unfortunately, do not sound that nice - the trumpet being one of them).
I've had some luck with Protected Mode games by booting up into Windows 98, loading a custom soundfont and then starting a DOS Command Prompt (full screen window).
I can then select General MIDI (not AWE32) in the game's setup menu and will then hear the custom soundfonts that I've loaded in Windows.

If you want to play your MIDI data via the AWE's external MIDI port, be sure to insert the "SET MIDI=SYNTH:2 MAP:E MODE:0" command into your Autoexec.bat file
SYNTH:1 routes MIDI data to your internal EMU8000 synthesiser, whereas SYNTH:2 routes MIDI data to the external MIDI port.

I tried it and whenever it uses General MIDI, the PC freezes…
Ah, my Doom doesn't have AWE32 in the music options… only SoundBlaster, Adlib, Midi, Disney, Ultrasound and Tandy.

Elia1995 wrote:

I tried it and whenever it uses General MIDI, the PC freezes…
Ah, my Doom doesn't have AWE32 in the music options… only SoundBlaster, Adlib, Midi, Disney, Ultrasound and Tandy.

The AWE32 support should come with a patch. I have a DOOM v 1.7 and I can confirm it has AWE32 in the setup. Also, Ultimate Doom supports it.

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Elia1995 wrote:

I tried it and whenever it uses General MIDI, the PC freezes…
Ah, my Doom doesn't have AWE32 in the music options… only SoundBlaster, Adlib, Midi, Disney, Ultrasound and Tandy.

Earlier versions of Doom didn't have native AWE support. It was introduced with a later release, namely version 1.4.

Just remember, Doom is a protected mode game. Aweutil only works with real mode games.
You can, however, try to run it via a Windows command prompt and then select General MIDI.
The benefit of this is that you can then load a custom soundfont that sounds much better than the standard 1 MB ROM sample set.

I only have MS-DOS 7 and Windows 3.11 in that PC, I can load soundfonts from Windows 3.1, but will it run the game in protected-mode like that ?

You can try to run Doom from within a Windows 3.11 command prompt.
It should utilise the Windows drivers, but I've only tested this myself on a Windows 98SE installation.

Otherwise, just download the updated patch for Doom (I have a suspicion that you still have version 1.2).
That is probably the easiest route to follow.

I'm going to check if the Steam version of ultimate doom has all the DOS executables, if it does, I'll then bring them to that DOS PC somehow, obviously I wont copy all the DOSBox related files.