As far as your roland problem I am still trying to bend my head around as to what you are actually doing. Are you using a a real Roland Mt-32 and telling dosbox to use?

I have included a screen shot of the available option in my sierra installer. the one that is currently selected ("General MIDI...") is the one I typically use.

in that case, even when using TiMidity, everything loads almost instantly.

if i chose the 1st one (Roldand-MT32), the game takes about 15 minutes to load. I had actually thought that DosBox was not responding when i first tried this, and i thought I closed out the program and opened another dosbox session choosing "General MIDI" audio this time..

while playing my second dosbox session, i suddenly heard the into music from the Roland MT-32" audio session of dosbox!

other (newer) sierra games don't take quite THAT long to boot using "Roldand MT-32" audio, but they definately take more than a minute or two.

I'm just wondering why it takes so long for everything to load when i chose "Roldand MT-32" but not long at all (a few seconds) when I chose "General Midi"

In terms of TiMidity, do you recomed I use only 1 SF2 file at a time? i usually use 3 or 4, (2 of them are over 100 MB, 1 is 65 MB, and one is 20 MB) -- i wonder if my games would sound different if I changed the order the soundfonts? -- or maybe removed some of them?

Increase your cycle count? 3000 is very low.

Increase your cycle count? 3000 is very low.

I increased cycles to 12000 -- it doesn't seem to be helping.

in any case all the games i am interested in playing are super old -- (most designed to even run on a 286 processor), and I have a QX6700 processor in this PC right now.

I don't think CPU cycles are the problem. what would be extremely helpful to me is to know if others are having similar results when choosing "Roland MT-32" audio while running TiMidity++ as their MIDI output.

Um. TiMidity++ does not do linear additive synthesis and is not an MT-32 emulator. You will not get the correct sound from TiMidity++.

TiMidity++ does not do linear additive synthesis and is not an MT-32 emulator.

maybe that's why the game takes so long to load.. i prefer the General MIDI audio source in most cases anyway.

now i have to go find out what "linear addative synthesis" means 😉

Galve2000 wrote:

if i chose the 1st one (Roldand-MT32), the game takes about 15 minutes to load. I had actually thought that DosBox was not responding when i first tried this, and i thought I closed out the program and opened another dosbox session choosing "General MIDI" audio this time..

while playing my second dosbox session, i suddenly heard the into music from the Roland MT-32" audio session of dosbox!

other (newer) sierra games don't take quite THAT long to boot using "Roldand MT-32" audio, but they definately take more than a minute or two.

Doesn't mean to necro an old thread, but still....

I also have problem with TWSYNTH (Timidity++ Windows MIDI driver), DOSBOX, and games that use MT-32/LAPC. Whenever I run a game that use Roland from DOSBOX, with TWSYNTH as Windows MIDI driver, the game doesn't respond at all. I thought the game (or DOSBOX) crashes, but after reading your post, it seems I experience similar problem - although I don't bother to wait for about 15 minutes. I think the wait time will be longer in my case, because I'm mostly using an Intel Atom netbook for my primary DOSBOX platform.

I also have Roland Virtual Sound Canvas, and when I'm using Roland VSC as Windows MIDI drivers, games that use MT-32/LAPC run without problem. Of course, the instrument doesn't sound as accurate as when using Munt. But the point line is: the problem only exists when using TWSYNTH as MIDI driver.

Recently, I tried BASSMIDIDRV as Windows MIDI driver, and games that use MT-32/LAPC can run - unlike TWSYNTH. Of course, the instruments don't sound right, but that's another thing. Well, maybe they will sound right with MT-32 SoundFont.

It seems TWSYNTH is the only SoundFont-based Windows MIDI driver that has problems with games that use Roland MT-32/LAPC, or am I wrong?

At this point, I would highly recommend using BASSMIDIDRV for GM games and ykhwong's DOSBox SVN build for built-in Munt MT-32 emulation. This is what I currently have on my laptop (versus real SC-88 and MT-32 synths on my desktop) and it works fairly well.