(my first post here, so before I get into anything else I'd just like to say thanks for all your hard work on the emulator!)

This new version really does sound great, especially in jones in the fast lane (though that still seems to be missing notes, but no worse than the version before.. but the notes themselves sound a ton better).

The new version does have some crackling that happens at the end of the wizardry 7 intro music though (not cpu usage related, that doesn't go much above 50%), which didn't happen in the previous version.. so I thought you might want to know about it even though the problem's listed in known issues on your page. I'll let you know if I find it elsewhere, since you probably don't have wizardy 7 to test with =P

-Mo

Thank you for this new version, which is indeed even better than the previous ones. I've owned an MT32 for years but can't use it much anymore since I'm now using a laptop and having to carry around a MIDI interface and the MT32 itself is not really possible... So thank you very much for allowing me to play old games and hear them the way they were meant to be heard.

There are still a few minor bugs in this release, which I noticed a few releases ago but never got around to reporting. You're problably aware of most of them but maybe not all, so I figured reporting them couldn't hurt anyway.

1) It's still very slightly off-tune. Not being a musician, it has now become quite hard for me to notice it, but there are still a few occasions where I can hear it, for instance Aziza's theme in Quest for Glory II, or the King's Quest tune at the beginning of King's Quest V.

2) In The Legend of Kyrandia, there is a problem with most 'sound effects' (I think with about all the 'long' one, ie those which are more than a simple 'pop'). What happens it that a single 'orchestra hit' note is played at the end on the sound effect. I think that what happens is that the game means to change the instrument after the sound effect ends, but somehow the instrument change occurs before the sound stops. I've checked with a real MT32 under DOS 6.22 and it doesn't occur there. I've also tried selecting win32 as my MIDI device under DOSBox (ie sending the music to my GM card) and it doesn't seem to happen there either.

3) In Cruise for a Corpse, the instruments are all wrong. The console shows that the emulator always uses the same 6 or so instruments and never changes. Sending the sound to my GM soundcard, I only get a piano playing, so I guess it's more of a problem with DOSBox midi implementation than with the emulator.

4) In Laura Bow: The Colonel's bequest, every time the clock chimes, I get half a dozen notes that shouldn't be there. I'll try and explain the problem clearly, but it's not that easy: the clock tune (played by some kind of bell, a custom patch made by Sierra) is made up of 4 parts: an introduction of 3 times 4 notes and the actual count of the hour. What happens is that, for each of the 4 parts, the first 2 notes are fine, and then I get half a dozen notes (played by the same bell instrument) on top of what should normally be played. Once again, I've tried sending the music to my GM card and it does not happen, so the problem comes from the emulator, not DOSBox.

Well, that's about it... Anyway, those are rather minor problems, so it does not matter much if they are ever corrected.

Thanks again for all your work!

PS : Oh yes, one last thing... Is there a chance of ever being able to compile the source under MINGW?

I have encorporated the changes in to the Linux driver version and
have uploaded the new version to my site (URL at the end of the post).

This release includes a simple GUI (xmt32) with a LCD 😀. A few small fixes were also included.

http://adam.rau.ac.za/~td/mt32-3-15.tar.bz2

This release includes a simple GUI (xmt32) with a LCD

I've been thinking about adding this to the windows version (dosbox)... I dunno how well receieved it would be (maybe a config option?)

Hmm,

Just a couple of notes on the new version:

(... Got a chance to download and play with it ...)

It seems, now the sounds are disbalanced the other way, now, i.e. the levels on some of the ones that seemed too high now seem too low... perhaps find something inbetween?

(This is also going off memory of hearing the music on an MT-32 long ago and far away ......)

-- Firehawk: Crash, Mission 6 music, end of "Boss" music. This is in generate sounds, I plugged the hole by simply adding a try...catch handler to the part of the routine that creates the sawtooth waveform. Something about the pitch-bends is making this go out of range, but I'm not quite sure what.

-- From what others have said, the de-tuned problem still exists. I've experimented around, and can't seem to find any means of correcting this.

-- Drum channel (Cymbal crashes seem to be a bit ... distorted.. ), also, in some of the songs which play toms in a roll, it appears like it's picking up spurious drum sounds, now.

-- One difference of note between the version I was working on and the new version is it seems like the low-pass filter has been strengthened, everything sounds slightly muffled.

.... For the time being, I think I will work toward the UI bit I mentioned above, simply for my own debugging, and button-pushing pleasures 😉. I'd like to be able to turn off/on channels, see notes being played on which sample. Might get a better feel for what remains of the issues.

It's coming together nicely, BTW! I'm impressed. Some of the stuff in there, such as the PCM format for the on-board samples I would have never guessed.

Also -- from what I've seen: It looks like not all of the "structures" are fully implemented as of yet, I've been on a snipe hunt to see how these things are wired, and so far, all I've seen is diagrams of the structures in patch editors, which seem to have gotten the information from the mystical ether, and don't really care to explain what 2 converging lines mean v.s. 2 parallel lines. <sigh> ...

Sorry for being lengthy, this is mainly just a braindump 😀

Just a quick shot of my "debug panel" for the Win32 Doxbox version...

Right now, I have no means of displaying multiple notes at once, so the note display is sometimes (usually) incorrect 😉

Other than that, it has the LCD display, Channels can be kicked on/off. Eventually I want to add a patch browser, as well. And display the partial count, Mod, Pitch, Volume, Partail Reserve. (maybe scale down the font, to keep things small... it's a lot of information....)

It doesn't appear to lag the system much, either.... but, then it's hard to tell on a 2+GHZ computer ....

Would anyone like this included? Let me know what you think!

Wow... that looks great. I'm trying to patch up these last few problems with the sound before I personally make any DosBox external release. Its just easier to test game output from there. I know Nemesis has completed library for the MT32 which I plan to use to make a portable Linux/Win32 driver in the near future, and I think a control panel like yours would go along with it quite well.

In other news, I took another stab at the filter tonight... its still not perfect, but it keeps getting closer and closer. I might have a new version ready by the end of the week!

I noticed some problems with latest version of emulator:

"Gateway" and Laser Squad - some notes aren't played. Previous version of emulator handled that correctly ( as well as win32 midi).
Spellcasting 201 - uses something like pitch variation effect which sounds badly in emulator.

I suggest latest dosbox CVS to play them (changes to mpu401.cpp and pic.cpp) because they use 'intelligent' mode. Games are freely available at The Underdogs.

I librarified, autoconfiscated, and debianized the latest release. it can be found here:
http://dbz.icequake.net/share/mt32

The library now has a C as well as C++ API. It builds with no problems with gcc 3.3.3. I had to ifdef out all the assembler b/c I didn't feel like translating it at the moment. If you want to embed the MT-32 emulator in another project, this approach is the way to go.

Here's a new shot of the panel, now with keyboards representing the notes.I need to rearrange things a bit to more efficiently use screen real-estate... It takes up a considerable amount of room, but it's kinda neat to watch 😉

How about color-coding? One color per channel, and one keyboard with multi-colored bullets? 😁

How about turning MT32emu into a VDMSound component? 😁

No need to, since it also comes as a windows driver... 😁
V.

And what about integrating the GUS code from DOSBox into VDMS?? 😜

Nice try. GUSEmu has been available for almost as long as VDMSound has, and works very nice independently of VDMSound (can work together too), so there. 😁

V.

I thought that GUSemu only supported demos, not games..

Can't say i've ever had much success in running anything in gusemu under windows 2000.

Exactly. The GUS emulation exists already, it's the DOS emulation in Windows that sucks. It's really not worth the effort to integrate GUSEmu into VDMSound just for the sake of integration *especially* since most of the time it would not work - or not be used by ppl.
V.