First post, by Kappa971
Hi, as the title suggests I would like to discuss this famous problem affecting the Road Rash game released for Windows 95 in 1996.
Using Coolsoft MIDI Mapper + LoopMIDI + Falcosoft MIDI Player (+ Sound Canvas VA) in Windows 10/11, when starting a race, "MIDI Error" will be displayed. Despite this error, the music works but it will work indefinitely, even after finishing the race. This problem seems to happen even when using only Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth (which acts as a MIDI mapper and software synthesizer).
A long time ago, I installed Windows 98 in PCEm and selecting the Sound Blaster AWE32 (emulated) as the MIDI device, the music worked perfectly. Selecting an external midi device (I think it was indicated as "MPU-401") in Windows 98 and the Sound Canvas VA (LoopMIDI) port in the PCEm settings, I was getting the exact same error also in Windows 98. This means that using a real Windows 98 PC with an external synthesizer, would I get the same error in this game??
Before Coolsoft MIDI Mapper was released, here WARNING: Currently impossible to change default midi device in Win8 was talking about modifying the game executable to point to a Device ID other than the Windows default (Microsoft GS Wavetable). There is this comment from the user @Silanda that says:
"Road Rash required some bypassing of code since it assumes that it can change MIDI volume through the Windows mixer, and freaks out when it can't. "
but it is not clear if with "freaks out" he meant the same error, and if with this bypass the game worked correctly.