do mac midi players play midi files correctly?

Argh, of course I forgot to test that. Ok, since Quicktime does not allow to output midi data to an external device, I downloaded the ""Sweet MIDI Player" for OS X. I additionally downloaded some Sierra GM soundtracks from QuestStudios.com (including the first bits of music and sound effects from Space Quest V).

Well, as far I can tell, the midis sound absolutely perfect on the SC-55. No unexpected volume changes, no missing or wrong instruments (on the SQ5 file I can hear the rats squeeking and the "out-of-the-room" music).

what about other games in dosbox?

Okay, I did a little bit of testing the last days and found out the following.
1. In all games the before mentioned problems occurs.
2. The problem is not exclusively dosbox related.

I tested the sc-55 with 3 Sierra Games (SQ5, Police Quest 4 and Leisure Suit Larry 6) and one non-Sierra game (Kyrandia 2). In all games the music is plagued by missing instruments, wrong instruments or wrong volume of some instruments.
But the problem does not occur reliable every time (though it is very easy to trigger by just passing some screens). For example in Police Quest 4 when I enter a location the music could be completely messed up. But there is always a good chance that when I re-enter the location for the second time the music will be completely fine.

I also downloaded ScummVM and tested Kyrandia 2 with it. Same problem.

But I also did a retesting on Windows with ScummVM, Dosbox, the games I mentioned, the same sc-55, the same midi-usb-adaptor and...I could never trigger the wrong behavior I experience on OS X.

for the sake of testing. Try with a low cycle value.
DOSBox doesn't buffer the midi data. It just outputs it to the host at the speed it receives it.
Some drivers allow themselves to loose data depending on the driver.

Ok, I tried different cycle values. Again with the beginning of SQ5 because the problem there was reproducible every time I tried. I first tried it with 4000 Cycles. Same Problem. 2000 Cycles. Same problem. At last I went down to 500 Cycles. This did not solve the problem completely either, but the music got noticeably better (no squeeking rats, but the Sierra fanfare did not drop in volume and the "walk-out-of-the-room"-music got played).

BTW: I did not install a special driver for this adaptor (and there is no driver available on the logilink website). It uses the USB-Midi-Driver-Plugin which is available in OS X out-of-the-box.

you can try even lower cycles. and when you want to speed up for a while you can rise them for a while to push action further, and than slow down again for listening.

Sure. But before I play a game in such an tedious way, I will just turn on my windows machine. You know, I just want to get it to work in OS X.

If it is a problem of the driver then everybody running OS X in combination with a sc-55 would have the same problem.

If it is a problem of the adaptor I will happily buy another one if I know for sure if it will work.

I was hoping that some guys here would raise their fingers because they have a similar setup. But it seems that I am a rare species with my setup 😒

my suggestion is for verifying the problem more, not for playing 😉

Hi,

sorry for the late reply, I was very busy the last days.

And apologies, I think I was a bit to quick in concluding that running the game at low cycle values solves the problem. Looks like it was pure coincidence. I tested now quite a bit and there is no noticeably difference, the music is always messed up.

However, I decided to buy another usb-midi-device (one that gets delivered with his own device driver). I will report back as soon as it arrives and then post my results.

I came here to revive this old thread because I have the same problems here. I am running OS X 10.8.4 with a SC-55 and Boxer (Dosbox). The only game I tried and want to play is Betrayal at Krondor and the music is totally off. I also have tried with two different usb-midi adapters to no avail.

Did anyone experience this issues and perhaps found a fix?

You need to use dosbox at least. Boxer is not supported

OK, I've tried running the game under DOSBox, but the results are the same (AFAIK Boxer runs DOSBox in the background).

Boxer uses a modified version of dosbox, that's why boxer is not supported.
Now with dosbox try different midi settings in the preference file.