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First post, by SkyHawk

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Holy Shit!

First off, let me take this opportunity to offer thanks to the programmers and maintainers of this awesome project!

I spent much of my childhood playing PC games rendered on an actual MT-32 device.... As time moved on, the MT-32 was retired, and eventually buried in a storage area... I had too many fond memories of it to throw it away... And now i'm glad I didn't!

Some years ago, I tried assembling a "Legacy gaming PC", and while that had some success, I found it to be a huge PITA and not really worth the trouble.

I'm fairly new to DOSBox, having found it at version 0.61. I don't know if it's the new ddraw renderer or other internal improvements, but 0.62 runs *many times* faster for me. And I read somewhere that it was possible to attach a physical MIDI device to the virtual MIDI port in the emulation...

So I did a little research, found out about the MPU-401 UART in most PCI soundcards, including my SBLive! and the special cable required to exploit it. I bought one of those cables today.

And as I type this post, I'm listening to Wing Commander II played on my MT-32. Doing what the MT-32 does best, playing back at the maximum reverb setting. 😁

Also of note, in the past I would have two or three different physical sound devices, (SoundBlaster, Ultrasound and MT-32), so speakers were a real problem. For a long time, I actually ran with my (MT32/UltraSound) wired up to my amp and bookshelf speakers, and my (UltraSound/SoundBlaster) wired up to some cerealbox speakers on my desk. I spent a lot of time swapping cables in those days. With this setup, I run the MT-32 to the Line-In on my SoundBlaster Live!, and presto! Always-accessible software and hardware (external amp) volume control for the *whole* *shebang*. One amp, one set of speakers ( and Headphones!! 😁 )

If anyone is interested in knowing what they're missing, feel free to ask and I'll cook up an MP3 of the MT-32s output. ( Actually, it'll be the output of the entire DOSBox sound system ).

Reply 2 of 11, by SkyHawk

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Oh? I assumed the LAPC-1 would sound identical to the MT-32... I thought it was basically an MT-32 + MPU-401 interface on a card.... For my purposes the only differences would be the lack of a hardware power button (to reset the synth) and the lack of a hardware control interface to set the reverb up!. (Which would mean I'd be locked into a 5/10 reverb setting by all the games that set reverb along with the rest of their sysex stuff).

It would also mean I could not use an LAPC-1 with DOSbox, because my machine has no ISA slots.... 😁

Am I mistaken?

Reply 4 of 11, by SkyHawk

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I don't know if anyone here can answer this, I'd imagine only the person who wrote the win32-midi code could answer it without doing an inordinate amount of research. I see in dosbox.conf that there is a "config" statement, in addition to the "device" statement, in the [midi] block. I presume "config" is there for passing parameters to the device.

As I've now got two "synths" attached to the MPU-401 [physical MT-32 attached to my soundcard's MIDI port, and the Synth on the soundcard itself for General Midi], it would be really cool if I could specify which MIDI port the "win32" device should use. This would allow me to run games without dicking around in the control panel to switch back and forth.

Reply 7 of 11, by robertmo

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Guest: you forget to say that after LAPC-I/CM-32L appeared games were mostly tested on lapc-i/cm-32l and that's why they don't work properly on mt-32 (buffer overflows in lots and lots of games)

Reply 8 of 11, by canadacow

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Of course, my MT-32 emulator doesn't have such problems with overflows. Oh, and I promise to upload a DosBox 0.62 MT-32 emulator enabled version this weekend!

Reply 9 of 11, by Drakk

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Sweet!

Not to be pushy, assuming, or anything more than slightly annoying in a strangely lovable way.. but, will this be a DosBox v0.62 with just MT-32 emulation added? Or, will it be like the 0.61 one where you had all the other test code in there (which unfortunately broke a few things making it necessary to choose between cool opengl, etc effects w/ blurring or MT-32 music... music won, btw).

Gotta say, I love your work. Both yours and the (rest of) the DosBox team. Thanks for all your efforts in the selfless pursuit of satisfying geeky nostalgia gamers world wide.

Reply 10 of 11, by canadacow

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Drakk wrote:

Sweet!

Not to be pushy, assuming, or anything more than slightly annoying in a strangely lovable way.. but, will this be a DosBox v0.62 with just MT-32 emulation added? Or, will it be like the 0.61 one where you had all the other test code in there (which unfortunately broke a few things making it necessary to choose between cool opengl, etc effects w/ blurring or MT-32 music... music won, btw).

Gotta say, I love your work. Both yours and the (rest of) the DosBox team. Thanks for all your efforts in the selfless pursuit of satisfying geeky nostalgia gamers world wide.

Yes, I've kept my personal test code in for this build. Should be posted tomorrow.

Reply 11 of 11, by SkyHawk

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> robertmo

Oh? I have vague memories of a tiny number of games that didn't run properly with the MT-32, despite claiming support. I remember buffer underruns beings part of the problems.... Interesting. I never knew why... And for the life of me, I can't recall which titles.