VOGONS


Reply 20 of 54, by lukeman3000

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It's unfortunate that DOSBox and the integrated MUNT seem to be at odds with each other as it sounds like keeping the mixer and OPL rate at 41000 is what I really want to do, but I cannot due to the distortion. So my options are to use external MUNT or set mixer/oplrate to 48000, which may produce distortion for FX since they are being upconverted to 48000 Hz.

The question is, how likely is it that this might be fixed, and also to what degree might I experience distortion by leaving mixer and oplrate set to 48000?

I just really like to idea of having MUNT integrated into DOSBox because of convenience it introduces. Not that opening MUNT up is by any means a hassle. It's just nice to have an all-in-one solution.

Reply 21 of 54, by sergm

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Sorry, I don't really understand the benefits of having mt32emu integrated in the DOSBox neither this way is officially supported (by both DOSBox and munt teams). If you're on Windows, DOSBox works with the MIDI driver seamlessly, just like with the integrated mt32emu engine (though, the latter requires patching the official DOSBox sources and building, btw).

Even assuming that DOSBox builds with integrated mt32emu are superior (somehow), the problem is easily solvable by using a more sophisticated resampler library within an unofficial DOSBox build (after all, why not? This is also an improvement). Aside from the famous libsamplerate, there are alternatives which provide for great quality yet consume much less CPU for resampling. Perhaps, this may appear interesting for someone. Though, this is out of munt scope. Indeed, we can include a resampler along with mt32emu in the DOSBox patch, but that would have little sense to use it just for mt32emu output (IMHO) and have inaccurate resampling from other audio sources.

Anyway, there is a cheat I plan to apply to the DOSBox patch on this weekend to (hopefully) improve things.

Reply 22 of 54, by Yesterplay80

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sergm wrote:

Sorry, I don't really understand the benefits of having mt32emu integrated in the DOSBox neither this way is officially supported (by both DOSBox and munt teams).

The only real benefit is that you don't have to install anything. I used to prefer installing external midi drivers as well, but since Windows 8 swapping the midi device is only possible using third party software, all of which I found so far made for older versions of Windows. I had BassMIDI running for a while but when I tried to use the default MIDI device of Windows (the Roland GS emulation), it wouldn't work anymore. So this third party software must have made changes that can't be undone easily. That's why I started to integrate other MIDI emus on DOSBox, so others don't have to meddle around with their system, possibly breaking MIDI playback, too.

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Reply 23 of 54, by sergm

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Well, this is a good point for poor users of Windows 8+. But DOSBox itself is luckily free of this issue (I hope). The only pain can be that Windows always messes MIDI port numbers when installing/removing MIDI drivers, so DOSBox's mixer /listmidi needs to be run to figure out the port number. Would be great to have an ability to refer MIDI port by name, btw.

Reply 24 of 54, by gdjacobs

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I'm not sure how audio outputs have been integrated here, but the principle idea of building Munt or other MIDI engines into DOSBox is being able to capture MIDI, OPL, and PCM audio output in sync with video when recording using built in DOSBox tools.

Personally, I like a more modular solution, but I can certainly see the convenience for a certain slice of users.

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Reply 25 of 54, by sergm

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Oh, yet another good point. I think the users who interested in capturing videos from DOSBox would also appreciate improvements in the audio quality. But then, the idea of using another audio output channel won't work 🙁

Reply 26 of 54, by lukeman3000

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My reasons come simply from a point of convenience. I like simply being able to open up D-Fend Reloaded, double-click the game I want to play, and that's it. Maybe it sounds silly, but if given the choice between opening another application, or not, I will choose the former.

Reply 27 of 54, by sergm

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Again: no need to "opening another application" to get sound from the mt32emu MIDI driver. It's just as convenient as you like. But of course midiconfig is a very annoying option to set... 😉

Reply 28 of 54, by lukeman3000

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sergm wrote:

Again: no need to "opening another application" to get sound from the mt32emu MIDI driver. It's just as convenient as you like. But of course midiconfig is a very annoying option to set... 😉

So in other words I don't need to run MUNT before playing a game?

Reply 29 of 54, by Dominus

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No, but you need to install the Munt midi driver once and have Dosbox select it via a config option

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Reply 30 of 54, by lukeman3000

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Dominus wrote:

No, but you need to install the Munt midi driver once and have Dosbox select it via a config option

I assume that this midi driver is installed by installing Munt.. So then running Munt is for the purposes of having the GUI and being able to adjust the MT-32 sound properties on the fly? I assumed that Munt had to be running (at least in the system tray) for MT-32 audio to work. If not then that is a bit different if it only requires a one-time install.

Reply 31 of 54, by sergm

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To be precise, mt32emu-qt is intended to be always (as long as you need) running in background by idea. If it bothers you, there are other options. On Windows, the MIDI driver shipped along with the installer package is the best available alternative to get it silent and "just work". Unfortunately, such things are quite different for other platforms but also available.

Also, the driver may well require reinstalling from time to time. This kind of MIDI drivers seems to be long deprecated by M$, so the settings can be overwritten when you attach/remove other USB devices.

Reply 32 of 54, by lukeman3000

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sergm wrote:

To be precise, mt32emu-qt is intended to be always (as long as you need) running in background by idea. If it bothers you, there are other options. On Windows, the MIDI driver shipped along with the installer package is the best available alternative to get it silent and "just work". Unfortunately, such things are quite different for other platforms but also available.

Also, the driver may well require reinstalling from time to time. This kind of MIDI drivers seems to be long deprecated by M$, so the settings can be overwritten when you attach/remove other USB devices.

Interesting. So should everything "just work" even after a restart? I.e., I shouldn't need to run Munt again after restating?

Reply 33 of 54, by sergm

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No need. You may need to open the UI for configuring various options only. Anyway, if the driver settings get broken, launching mt32emu-qt won't help. But I may add a consistency check for the driver installation since this is getting annoying lately...

Reply 34 of 54, by collector

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One advantage of a DOSBox with Munt build is that the MT-32 track will be captured by the builtin DOSBox capture. No need to do a separate capture and then having to sync it.

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Reply 35 of 54, by lukeman3000

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sergm wrote:

Also, the driver may well require reinstalling from time to time. This kind of MIDI drivers seems to be long deprecated by M$, so the settings can be overwritten when you attach/remove other USB devices.

Interestingly enough I experienced this tonight. I made sure that the munt GUI wasn't running in my system tray then launched dosbox and tried mixer /listmidi, and it only listed the microsoft gs wavetable synth. I thought this was strange since I had just recently installed munt.

So, I reinstalled and then mt-32 synth emulator was listed. I wonder what I did that caused that issue.

Edit: I seem to have found some kind of glitch with the Munt GUI. When the Munt GUI is given focus, the DOSBox image freezes after a few seconds. It can be unfrozen by closing the Munt GUI. Video of this here.

Also, how can I delete a profile? I accidentally created a profile and want to get rid of it, but can't figure out how to do this. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling Munt and it was still there. Is there a registry entry I have to delete or something similar?

Edit: Figured out how to delete a profile.

Last edited by lukeman3000 on 2017-01-29, 08:49. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 36 of 54, by sergm

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Sorry, but I don't see an easy solution to this issue. The SDL sources look like reopening the audio device is prevented. Although, SDL provides a nicely named function SDL_ConvertAudio(), I don't think it may work even as bad as the DOSBox's internal mixer in reality. Fairly saying, I'm sort of disappointed by such attitude...

One more suggestion I can offer is to set mt32.analog=3 in configuration. This should certainly reduce aliasing when converting to the standard rate 44100Hz (though this is by far not as good as a proper resampler would do).

Reply 37 of 54, by lukeman3000

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sergm wrote:

Sorry, but I don't see an easy solution to this issue. The SDL sources look like reopening the audio device is prevented.

To what issue are you referring? The one where the MT-32 synth sometimes disappears from listmidi, or the second issue I posted about wherein dosbox freezes when the Munt GUI window receives focus?

Reply 39 of 54, by lukeman3000

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sergm wrote:

I'd not mess it up here.

I'm sorry sergm, I'm not sure what you mean here

Do you have any insight into why my DOSBox window seems to freeze when the Munt GUI window receives focus as mentioned above, or is this something I should create a new thread for or perhaps submit a bug report on sourceforge?