If it's of any use to anyone, I have a copy of the original yamaha installer files and a fix that you apply yourself.

Dosboxxer wrote on 2020-10-28, 09:09:

If it's of any use to anyone, I have a copy of the original yamaha installer files and a fix that you apply yourself.

This to play on new operating systems? I've been looking for this for a long time. I had a lot of work to make the XG plugin with VL work on the PC. To use Midi XG with Vl songs the only way I had was to use a virtual machine with Windows 98.

HunterZ wrote on 2020-04-26, 18:12:

Windows 10 MCI MIDI support seems the same as it has been since Windows 3.1, except that they removed the MIDI Mapper applet for choosing the default device.

CoolSoft MIDI Mapper works well as a replacement. DOSBox and I think ScummVM also let you specifically pick a device number to use.

I wish it were as simple as this. It actually doesn't work like that with 10 at this point. That did indeed work fine with 8/8.1, but 10 -- or at least current versions of 10 (I don't know about older versions) -- no longer even can work with CoolSoft MIDI Mapper. Every time you run something like DOSBox it informs you the default device is no longer set and you have to set a new one then it doesn't let you actually choose a device. I suppose it's not such a surprise that MS is basically killing off MIDI since it is, admittedly, horrendously outdated, but it really does suck for legacy things (which from their point of view we shouldn't want to use, but, well, we do.)

I'm not really sure what long term solutions are. The best I can think of would be stuff like built in emulation via some relatively standard library in things like DOSBox and etc. I see plenty of soundfont-based GM emulation in all these things, but it's kind of depressing that no one working on such things even seems to remember XG existed, much less that it actually was better in basically every way. (Ok, the actual waveforms are worse than, say, a 120MB soundfont, but for MIDI made for older things rather than made for soundfonts often enough XG is a better choice.) I wish more things could use VSTi plugins.

Danindanis wrote on 2021-06-17, 02:43:

Dosboxxer wrote on 2020-10-28, 09:09:

If it's of any use to anyone, I have a copy of the original yamaha installer files and a fix that you apply yourself.

This to play on new operating systems? I've been looking for this for a long time. I had a lot of work to make the XG plugin with VL work on the PC. To use Midi XG with Vl songs the only way I had was to use a virtual machine with Windows 98.

No, you can't install the older drivers on modern operating systems. The older drivers aren't even the right type for modern systems and can't work in anything less than XP (which still can have issues.) Newer ones (which I think the 100 didn't do?) are 32-bit at most and can't work on 64-bit systems, but also just plain don't meet modern specifications. The closest thing you can do is use a VSTi plugin version of the software synthesizer, but I don't think they made one for the S-YXG100. If you're just wanting to listen, then the S-YXG50 does have a VST plugin available and there are a number of programs (like Foobar2000) that can use it. If you google there's a modified version of it that has better defaults built in on the configuration, uses the 4MiB waveset, and doesn't require a license. Though even if you're composing the XG50 still offered a lot of what the 100 offers.

MIDISelector4.0 still works fine for me under Windows 10 Pro x64 build 21H1 . DOSBox MIDI config, for example, is left at default and whatever I select in MIDI selector (MUNT, LoopMIDI port mapped to Synthie which is configured for Cakewalk TTS-1, Microsoft GS Wavetable synth, etc) receives DOSBox's MIDI data .

Just wanted to bump this up with a clarification. Windows 10 still has MIDI support and Microsoft has a MIDI API that they made for Windows 10, adding a bunch of features for modern uses. Things just aren't outwardly user-accessible like they were with the older Windows, because Windows 10 was designed to keep people from getting into things and causing problems. Also, Audio acceleration is also a thing, it just isn't used by most audio hardware that uses drivers built for the Vista/7/8 design, but it can be enabled with driver support for it. That being said, it's theoretically possible to bring back EAX support on older SB hardware, with modified drivers.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/20 … -in-windows-10/

I've installed this on my Dell Inspiron 8100 which has an Dell Inspiron 8100 ESS Technology Maestro-3i. Sounds quality is generally terrible.

Midi is working great in Windows, for example Doom95 is sounding much better. Is there a way to get it working with games like Duke3d, Descent, Blood, Transport tycoon which are DOS games but run in Win9x? Testing the midi in the setup programs with general midi, nothing is heard but it is correclty detected. Changing back from YAMAHA SXG Driver to the default Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth , audio is then heard but not using the driver.
Also, the XGPlayer also works great along the 4MB soundbanks. 2MB and 4MB tested and work on Windows 98 SE
Thanks

You have to use DOSBox or Windows Executable versions/frontends of whatever game you are hoping to use it with. Then you can use it as you would any other MIDI device in Windows.

This is where DOS Box would be beneficial on 98se and millennium: for dos games to used xg100 😁
So those without BARE BONES I wonder: virtual pc + win98se + xg100 + DOSBOX + DOS GAME (in dos box)= dos game with music and effects?

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-04-26, 12:50:

You have to use DOSBox or Windows Executable versions/frontends of whatever game you are hoping to use it with. Then you can use it as you would any other MIDI device in Windows.

So im in Win 98 se and open Duke3d.exe or setup.exe (not running from DOS)
ESS audio works when using soundblaster for effects. General midi is detected but nothing is heard.
Surely Dosbox isnt required in Win98se as general midi using Microsoft GS Wavetable has no problems. Its then changed to the Yamaha XG driver and fails to work. At that point, shouldnt it work?

Oh man, it has been so long I'd almost forgotten all this stuff. Ok, so I'm starting to remember now. In Windows 9x, drivers have to very specially set things up to be able to "emulate" a physical device for legacy (DOS) software. I think the trick to that is it has to actually add a physical device with a port, an interrupt, etc which actual soundcards can sometimes do, but I've never seen a driver for something like MIDI do. A typical software synthesizer will add a device to the MIDI mapper, but nothing else. Setting up a virtual device on legacy systems is... not easy I think, and I don't recall seeing anything truly do it. The closest I ever saw was the AWE drivers setup sort of an emulated legacy SoundBlaster card since it used the EMU chipset that just plain didn't work the same. It still was mostly just "translating" and redirecting stuff to the real hardware though, not using a true software synthesis. I used to have a Yamaha YMF724 soundcard which was very strongly not made for use in pure DOS. It could only act as a SB Pro (not even 16!) in pure DOS via its pure DOS drivers (I guess I was lucky even to have that?) and no wavetable (the YMF724 has no sample ROM -- the drivers actually loaded the samples into RAM in Windows.) If I tried to play a game in pure DOS mode using GM it would produce silence for the MIDI. In Windows 9x it would actually provide the ports and etc for DOS games to use (including 16-bit sound) and could play General MIDI as well. However, I think this too wasn't really emulating so much as just redirecting to the physical hardware.

Unfortunately, you just don't really have any real options for 9x on real hardware as far as I'm aware. I don't think anything ever actually did it. Doing so would have been prohibitively difficult and probably would render the system unstable besides. It's worth noting that "General MIDI" can't so much be detected as it's just "there." Things seeing GM is more like "the port can theoretically exist" whether or not it even actually does. For that matter, a device can have no physical means of attaching a daughterboard and still that would "be there" so to speak. Because it isn't even really detecting something physically present. For a true old computer with true hardware your only option I'm afraid is, well, true hardware. Unfortunately that's likely to be very costly these days as most such old hardware was already relatively rare even a few years back and these days is even more so with many no longer working probably even. Do bear in mind (especially if that's a laptop as I think you said?) that there are external MIDI options. That may be your best bet. I forget what physical connection means they used (I never once had one or saw one in person) but a laptop can probably do it. I feel like I saw them using the parallel (printer) port? Alternately, maybe there is a PCMCIA card out there that isn't too bad for wavetable synthesis, but I wouldn't expect to find much for legacy hardware (and getting drivers and all would be even harder.) I'm afraid it's fast reaching a point you have to either pump lots of money into setting up the perfect DOS system or just give up and go to emulation.

It's worth noting that Windows NT no longer had actual true DOS mode in it. When you run a legacy (DOS) application in a NT system it uses a sort of super minimal virtual machine type of thing -- NTVDM -- so actually can emulate some stuff in a much more minimal way than things like DOSBox do for the advantage of not needing much processing power to do it (and the disadvantage of being a lot less capable or compatible. MS was aiming for a "good enough" sort of design with NTVDM, whereas DOSBox is aiming for such high accuracy it can even emulate CGA snow.) It has been a long time and I do not remember well at all anymore, but I think I can remember it also redirecting General MIDI to the Windows MIDI mapper (eg can work with software synthesizers.) There was also a third party modification of NTVDM aimed at making it better at DOS gaming which I think was hosted on this site somewhere back before DOSBox became such a thing and that may or may not be necessary to do this. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me remember what it was called or if you specifically need it for this. If you want to go this route, maybe you can try to see if Windows XP or 2000 can run on that system and see what you can do with that? If you're going to try that, look up "XPLite" or the 2000Lite equivalent which was a software that could slim down XP and 2000 a bit and maybe you can get it to take less space and run a bit better.

EDIT: Looking up the Inspiron 8100, it seems like it actually was pretty amazing for its time period. The processor is quite beefy for its time as a small process Pentium 3 at 1.13GHz. Stock RAM is 256MiB which might be a tad low for XP (though still doable -- especially if you use XPLite and remove a few unnecessary services for stuff that no longer works or that you wouldn't need) but it's workable if you wanted to try XP. (It also can be upgraded to 512MiB, which is pretty much XP's sweet spot. As it uses a relatively standard PC133 SDRAM it may actually be not too costly or hard to upgrade even today.) I think you should be able to get some DOSBox versions working on XP, so that does open up possibilities for really old DOS games probably at least up to the 386 era. Combine that with the NTVDM mod if you can find it and between the two I think you probably can get more or less all you want out of DOS gaming for most if not all of your collection. I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Windows 9x on that system, but if this is a direction you can go it may be worth doing it. Of course, you can always dual boot, but that is a bit of a pain. Even with Windows 9x you still can, though it's a bit harder. (If you want the simplest setup, you can multi-partition and then use Syslinux to boot across them, but even Windows XP's own bootloader can actually dual-boot Windows 9x.)

-

As for newer systems, right now I don't think you're going to get any legacy stuff of this nature to work in 10 anymore at all. It has basically dumped just about everything left over that any of these things worked with. As mentioned, your best options at this point are basically emulation. Honestly, this will eventually happen regardless, but I do feel like 10 pushed to make this arbitrarily happen a little early. (That said, even if it hadn't, you'd need to run in 32-bit mode for a lot of this stuff anyway due to 16-bit software/drivers in some.) Probably anyone still using legacy stuff of this nature should go ahead and get used to the idea of running a virtual system using something such as Windows 9x (98SE with the "Third Edition" patches might make the most sense IMO, but maybe Millennium can be fixed up to be less buggy via third party patches too to get better support for USB storage and such.) Honestly it does make sense that as computers move forward, legacy support will begin to suffer, but I do honestly feel like at this point we need an equivalent of DOSBox made specifically for Windows (not just DOSBox-X which is merely designed to be better at Windows, but something specifically designed to emulate a Windows 9x system in the way DOSBox is designed to emulate a MS-DOS system) because eventually a lot of legacy stuff won't work anymore including older games built for 9x or 3.1 that already it's a struggle getting working properly in 10. Meanwhile I guess we have to get used to using a VMWare/VirtualPC/whatever setup, but I guess there isn't going to be much of a solution for stuff like getting software synth MIDI working in DOS mode of an emulated 9x system. You'll have to have a separate setup with DOSBox on 7 or something I guess for a mix of old and new. But for now maybe there's a better way still.

FWIW, there is an option for running VST drivers for MIDI. However, this only works with VSTi plugins the host system can execute obviously. I don't know if there is anything like that available for the XG100. There was a S-YXG50 VSTi plugin once, which some of us are now using along with a VST MIDI driver program. Someone managed to get it unofficially working in the latest versions of 10 with a beta (unfortunately MS changed how the registry is set for the default MIDI device and it wouldn't set after the change with any of the older software. I think this change is still not in anything official yet.) This post linked to the one that seems to be working ok for me right now: Re: VST Midi Driver Midi Mapper There is a version of the S-YXG50 VST plugin that has been modified to be preconfigured with better settings defaulted to on (reverb, chorus, etc, full number of voices instead of the original default) along with the 4MB sample ROM. You can find that via google pretty easily (I'm not sure if it's legal or not to distribute that, so I'll assume not until proven otherwise.) Someday I hope we might see something such as VST support in DOSBox, but, as many options as that opens up, it does still mean any system that can't execute the VSTs (such as when running an ARM build of DOSBox) wouldn't be able to use them. What I'd personally enjoy seeing in such a thing would be an actual DB50XG emulator in things like DOSBox, ScummVM, and etc, but I don't think that would ever happen. Using this, for a little bit longer at least we can run DOSBox directly with S-YXG50. Someday we'll probably have to give up and go 100% emulation though.

Obviously that doesn't help you S-YXG100 users actually wanting to use the features of the 100 versus the 50, but DOS games won't use the extra functionality anyway. I'm not sure if any DOS MIDI trackers/etc are even capable of using the more advanced features of the 100? Really most DOS software doesn't even use the XG extensions anyway (in fact, most don't even use GS extensions.) I just like this because I like the XG sound as a general purpose MIDI player across multiple DOS games rather than setting up individual soundfonts for each or whatever. (Soundfonts are just so... well, personal. Everyone has different tastes and every game sounds best with a different soundfont -- some even would sound best if you could change it per track somehow. The DB50XG/S-YXG50 doesn't sound better than a really good soundfont, but it does sound good across everything without having to use DLS or something for each individual game.) So hopefully this can help you not to have to have quite such a complex setup for at least that one use scenario?

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2021-08-16, 21:20:

Just wanted to bump this up with a clarification. Windows 10 still has MIDI support and Microsoft has a MIDI API that they made for Windows 10, adding a bunch of features for modern uses. Things just aren't outwardly user-accessible like they were with the older Windows, because Windows 10 was designed to keep people from getting into things and causing problems. Also, Audio acceleration is also a thing, it just isn't used by most audio hardware that uses drivers built for the Vista/7/8 design, but it can be enabled with driver support for it. That being said, it's theoretically possible to bring back EAX support on older SB hardware, with modified drivers.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/20 … -in-windows-10/

Ok, that is an old post, so I'm sorry to respond to it after all this time but I'm just going to have to. Yes Windows 10 still has MIDI, but the MIDI support in 10 is significantly impacted. And no it's not "improved." First of all, your claim that they remove the user's ability to select a default device (or, for that matter, for a default device to even be anything else other than the awful MS Roland synth without jumping through a lot of hoops) doesn't even make sense. Let me ask you: what can a user mess up in a system by changing the default MIDI device? In fact, in a typical user's system, what even is there to select but the single option? The only way you even can mess up anything by selecting a different MIDI device is if you've installed a setup with loopback or etc and it's not correctly configured so you get silence when playing MIDI. Yeah. Worst case scenario is silence when playing MIDI -- a thing most 10 users have never done in 10 anyway. You don't get crashes or corruption of system processes or something, just silence.

Meanwhile, as far as "enhancements" to MIDI go, that doesn't make sense. To begin with, MIDI is a legacy mechanism that is hardly even being used anymore. At this point changing it doesn't make sense. It would be like making a MS DOS 8.0 with new API calls aimed at making new DOS games better but also breaking all support for anything meant to run on 6.22 or 5.0 by removing APIs those used stating that 8.0's implementations are better. I don't think even indie devs would make anything new for DOS anymore at this point and even if they did they'd be better served aiming at FreeDOS. We don't need MS to "help" us in such a thing and same for MIDI features, and the solution in such a situation is the same as what we're already having to do now -- having to keep multiple separate setups for each thing. Making us have to have one more such separate setup isn't the answer -- we want to be able to combine them, not force to split more.

No, MS is just pulling an Apple thing where they decide what is best for the user and the user is just supposed to adapt. Yes, they declare their way is best. That doesn't make it true any more than Apple's claims that it would be better if we abandoned standard PCs in favor of things that can't even run legacy stuff at all. Here's the thing: we didn't buy standard "IBM compatible" PC systems (I know no one calls this setup that anymore, but I don't think there is a better term for the modern equivalent other than that people just call them the generic term "PC" which could mean anything) to be forced into a situation where we don't have control over our own systems. If we want that we'll switch to Apple and let Apple tell us what we can do with our computers. MS is more and more going the Apple direction and frankly I hope it comes back to bite them, but regardless, we don't need to defend anti-competitive decisions that harm legacy support here of all places.

PS. Sorry for all the edits. It has been a long long time since I messed with legacy MIDI support outside of a modern system.

Yes it's lovely that Microsoft has done all this work on APIs and UWP apps, but none of that helps people who just want to change their MIDI device. At the end of the day we're out here using third party programs to replace a feature they removed.

Right. At the end of the day, most of the people actually using it still have to use third party fixes. And even those broke with the 2004 update requiring an updated third party fix. What bugs me about this most is basically what MS is saying here is "you won't want to use anything else but our synthesizer, so don't bother trying." Now, I'm not a music creator, so I can't comment on all the capabilities of MIDI synthesizers in this regard, but as an end user just wanting things to sound nice I can definitely say that the MS Roland synthesizer really is not that great sounding. What's more, even I know that it can be objectively proven to be inferior -- as in it has fewer features and functions versus competing synthesizers such as XG and most if not all modern synthesizers publicly available regardless of how you feel about the sampleset (which is prohibitively difficult for end users to do anything about. I'm given to understand it supports DLS -- I know the game No One Lives Forever used that in fact -- but I never was able to figure out how to actually utilize that as an end user to at least make it sound nicer for anything else.) I'm not a music creator, so maybe I don't know enough about how that process goes, but I do legitimately wonder: do any music creators actually prefer the Microsoft MIDI synthesizer versus the many (technically superior at least on paper) alternatives out there? For that matter, do any prefer to just not even have a choice?

I'll admit I was a bit surprised to see the stuff about UWP MIDI access. I'm a bit surprised MS is saying that there is a lot of call for this really. I can't imagine many apps actually using MIDI -- certainly app games don't -- but I presume there must be something for actual music creation. It seems like a pretty bad platform to choose for such a task to me. The article at least implied there were a number of devs actually using it (assuming they're being honest.) In fact, if I was going to make such an app I wouldn't want to rely on the OS to handle it but would, in fact, integrate some synthesizer library so the app itself could control for quality and functionality instead of crossing its fingers and hoping for the best so to speak. Still, that doesn't change the fact that MS' primary solution here is to break normal user control. If an app wants to use actual MIDI and wants to offset all actual control and functionality to the OS to avoid the actual effort of integrating it all, would they not want to still have control over what the host actually uses?

Anyway, for now at least there's a partial solution in newer things to manually override via registry entries. Eventually MS is going to take that away probably unfortunately. Long term those of us using this sort of thing probably will all eventually have to go towards emulation and/or virtual machines. (One of these days I plan to sit down and figure out some completely open source emulator such as QEMU and setup a full Windows 7 system with DOSBox with Windows 3.1 and ScummVM setup for Windows 9x games to work ok too, but it's a very confusing and daunting process versus the easier non-open options.) Honestly legacy support will decrease over time -- that's just a given as tech progresses -- just I think it's wrong that this isn't actually a loss of legacy support as much as it's an intentional arbitrary limitation applied to it unnecessarily.

so i've been following this thread with interest since i use the 4mb S-YXG50 wdm driver referenced in the first post. i'm not sure i understand the rational of the effort expended to get this working under win98se (unless it all boils down to os preference which is justification in and of itself).

i dual boot winxp & win98se myself, but honestly i could just as well dual boot winxp & dos7.1 as my msdos.sys dumps me into dos by default and i can't remember the last time i was in win98se. under winxp i have the following software synthesizers available system wide in the midi mapper:
- microsoft gs wavetable
- timidity++
- bassmidi driver
- fluidsynth (via midi yoke)
- S-YXG50 4/2 mb
- roland virtual sound canvas
- munt
- creative software synth (wdm)
- awe64 hardware synth (via winNT vxd driver)
all of the above are available as a softmpu target via serial port (using hairless midi serial bridge) or in a windows command prompt or in dosbox. if a particular soundfont/wavetable isn't desired i'll just boot into dos7.1 and use my awe64 with or without aweutil.

i'm not line iteming system capabilities to question why you primitives are doing what you're doing instead of doing what i'm doing because being me, and not you, means it's better. i'm genuinely ignorant of what advantages win98se has, in whatever particular use case, since i don't use it. what am i missing out on?

after all, i installed win98se. would be nice to start using it for effect.

Nazo wrote on 2022-04-26, 21:45:

Oh man, it has been so long I'd almost forgotten all this stuff. Ok, so I'm starting to remember now. In Windows 9x, drivers h […]
Show full quote

Oh man, it has been so long I'd almost forgotten all this stuff. Ok, so I'm starting to remember now. In Windows 9x, drivers have to very specially set things up to be able to "emulate" a physical device for legacy (DOS) software. I think the trick to that is it has to actually add a physical device with a port, an interrupt, etc which actual soundcards can sometimes do, but I've never seen a driver for something like MIDI do. A typical software synthesizer will add a device to the MIDI mapper, but nothing else. Setting up a virtual device on legacy systems is... not easy I think, and I don't recall seeing anything truly do it. The closest I ever saw was the AWE drivers setup sort of an emulated legacy SoundBlaster card since it used the EMU chipset that just plain didn't work the same. It still was mostly just "translating" and redirecting stuff to the real hardware though, not using a true software synthesis. I used to have a Yamaha YMF724 soundcard which was very strongly not made for use in pure DOS. It could only act as a SB Pro (not even 16!) in pure DOS via its pure DOS drivers (I guess I was lucky even to have that?) and no wavetable (the YMF724 has no sample ROM -- the drivers actually loaded the samples into RAM in Windows.) If I tried to play a game in pure DOS mode using GM it would produce silence for the MIDI. In Windows 9x it would actually provide the ports and etc for DOS games to use (including 16-bit sound) and could play General MIDI as well. However, I think this too wasn't really emulating so much as just redirecting to the physical hardware.

Unfortunately, you just don't really have any real options for 9x on real hardware as far as I'm aware. I don't think anything ever actually did it. Doing so would have been prohibitively difficult and probably would render the system unstable besides. It's worth noting that "General MIDI" can't so much be detected as it's just "there." Things seeing GM is more like "the port can theoretically exist" whether or not it even actually does. For that matter, a device can have no physical means of attaching a daughterboard and still that would "be there" so to speak. Because it isn't even really detecting something physically present. For a true old computer with true hardware your only option I'm afraid is, well, true hardware. Unfortunately that's likely to be very costly these days as most such old hardware was already relatively rare even a few years back and these days is even more so with many no longer working probably even. Do bear in mind (especially if that's a laptop as I think you said?) that there are external MIDI options. That may be your best bet. I forget what physical connection means they used (I never once had one or saw one in person) but a laptop can probably do it. I feel like I saw them using the parallel (printer) port? Alternately, maybe there is a PCMCIA card out there that isn't too bad for wavetable synthesis, but I wouldn't expect to find much for legacy hardware (and getting drivers and all would be even harder.) I'm afraid it's fast reaching a point you have to either pump lots of money into setting up the perfect DOS system or just give up and go to emulation.

It's worth noting that Windows NT no longer had actual true DOS mode in it. When you run a legacy (DOS) application in a NT system it uses a sort of super minimal virtual machine type of thing -- NTVDM -- so actually can emulate some stuff in a much more minimal way than things like DOSBox do for the advantage of not needing much processing power to do it (and the disadvantage of being a lot less capable or compatible. MS was aiming for a "good enough" sort of design with NTVDM, whereas DOSBox is aiming for such high accuracy it can even emulate CGA snow.) It has been a long time and I do not remember well at all anymore, but I think I can remember it also redirecting General MIDI to the Windows MIDI mapper (eg can work with software synthesizers.) There was also a third party modification of NTVDM aimed at making it better at DOS gaming which I think was hosted on this site somewhere back before DOSBox became such a thing and that may or may not be necessary to do this. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me remember what it was called or if you specifically need it for this. If you want to go this route, maybe you can try to see if Windows XP or 2000 can run on that system and see what you can do with that? If you're going to try that, look up "XPLite" or the 2000Lite equivalent which was a software that could slim down XP and 2000 a bit and maybe you can get it to take less space and run a bit better.

EDIT: Looking up the Inspiron 8100, it seems like it actually was pretty amazing for its time period. The processor is quite beefy for its time as a small process Pentium 3 at 1.13GHz. Stock RAM is 256MiB which might be a tad low for XP (though still doable -- especially if you use XPLite and remove a few unnecessary services for stuff that no longer works or that you wouldn't need) but it's workable if you wanted to try XP. (It also can be upgraded to 512MiB, which is pretty much XP's sweet spot. As it uses a relatively standard PC133 SDRAM it may actually be not too costly or hard to upgrade even today.) I think you should be able to get some DOSBox versions working on XP, so that does open up possibilities for really old DOS games probably at least up to the 386 era. Combine that with the NTVDM mod if you can find it and between the two I think you probably can get more or less all you want out of DOS gaming for most if not all of your collection. I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Windows 9x on that system, but if this is a direction you can go it may be worth doing it. Of course, you can always dual boot, but that is a bit of a pain. Even with Windows 9x you still can, though it's a bit harder. (If you want the simplest setup, you can multi-partition and then use Syslinux to boot across them, but even Windows XP's own bootloader can actually dual-boot Windows 9x.)

Thanks Nazo, very detailed reply 😀
So as I understand it, the ESS Maestro 3i card in the Inspiron has drivers that can use Microsoft GS wavetable general midi in DOS games played on 9x but the same drivers do not hook into the Yamaha XG software synth? If there was the capability (drivers) for the ESS Maestro 3i card that allowed different general midi software synth then it may work.
Failing that, DOSBox can be used 9x which does have drivers to use software synth and probably other general midi.

The Inspiron 8100 was (is) a great laptop but it's such as shame they cheaped out on the sound! If I did go to XP I would probably get an external Soundblaster Audigy PCMCIA card which has reasonable Soundblaster software emulation. But then games wouldnt be supported on XP so would need to run them in DOSbox anyway.
At which point DOSBox has good OPL3 and midi emulation so there's no point getting the Audigy!
I may as well try DOSbox on Win 98SE and see if it uses the software synth. My guess is that it will work, but very slowly being emulation.
I looked at the PCMCIA route and looked on ebay for cards but the good ones like Roland SCP-55 are very rare and expensive (£300-£500) when they do come up. It's also a very niche product for something to have a few plays of Duke nukem 3d and other early games!

Maybe DOSBox on my main system (Ryzen 5800X, 32GB RAM, 3080FE) is the way to go. OPL3 in DOSbox sounds almost identical to OPL3 on some older Soundblaster ISA cards. There are a few comparisons and honestly I couldnt tell the difference sometimes!

No, Windows 9x doesn't even have the MS synthesizer if I recall. Soundcard drivers won't really "hook into" a software synthesizer -- I don't think any ever have anyway. I was only saying there were some examples of some redirecting to physical hardware in a method that almost resembled emulating a soundcard for DOS games as being the closest thing to what you seemed to be looking for. That said, I was getting a bit mixed up between the different subjects being discussed in this thread and thought at first as I wrote that you were using it in a newer version of Windows. The ESS card has its own wavetable synthesizer and what you're getting when you use it with games is that. From what I could tell upon googling, apparently it didn't even have a proper FM synthesizer and used the wavetable to approximate it (apparently badly) so it apparently kind of sucks in general for gaming audio. I suppose from Dell's point of view the laptop was more oriented towards pretty much everything but gaming (remember, gaming laptops are a very recent thing. Back then people used laptops mostly for more business-oriented purposes or at least stuff like typing on the go and etc with gaming just being a sort of side bonus.) Although, if I recall, ESS sound hardware may have been fairly common for laptops back in the day, so it may be Dell wasn't even really making much of a choice one way or the other with it. I'm afraid what you've been experiencing is just the limitations of all the hardware can even do in Windows 9x. From what I could tell upon googling it sounds like that soundcard can't even do MIDI at all in pure DOS either.

DOSBox, as far as I know, can't be used in Windows 9x. Maybe a really really old version, but you'd probably have such awful results from it as to not be worth it. My suggestion was that you might perhaps consider installing Windows 2000 (officially supported on that model) or Windows XP (should still run very well -- especially if you slim it down with XPLite.) And then you may not even need DOSBox because Windows NT versions (including 2000 and XP and newer) uses NTVDM to sort of emulate a DOS system kind of like how DOSBox does (but much much worse.) I can tell you I remember specifically using that third party NTVDM mod that improved things a bit to play DOS games along with the S-YXG50 synthesizer on Windows XP. So my suggestion was to go ahead and go to XP for your best results with MIDI on that system. But do with that as you will. Your options in 9x are going to be severely limited if you don't go the XP route and you'll pretty much just have to make do with whatever you can there. Perhaps a PCMCIA soundcard might help? I'm not really sure what your options are in that regard, but you'll have to look to true hardware solutions for 9x and pure DOS.

Now, I don't know which way you want to go with all this or why you're using that system with Windows 9x. If your purpose is nostalgia in using older hardware running older software then I can understand not going the DOSBox route. Though, of course, if you truly want to do that you need to get actual desktop hardware from the 486 or early Pentium 1 era with ISA slots, an actual ISA videocard and soundcard and etc. If your goal is just to make that system good for retro gaming, then my suggestion remains go to XP and the NTVDM mod, preferably upgrading the RAM to 512MiB for best results (unless it already is 512 of course.) It should be good for a pretty huge range of games then as it has a fairly impressive GPU for a laptop of its era, so you'd have gaming covered for a pretty long range between the two (with perhaps a few compatibility issues here and there since NTVDM never was even close to as accurate or capable as DOSBox.) You can probably find a version of DOSBox that will run on XP (of note, DOSBox-X says something about "low end builds" working on XP even with current versions, but I'm not quite sure how you get such a build -- it may have to be done manually yourself) to play really old games with, but I'm guessing that hardware probably wouldn't handle complex 486-era games well. If your goal is just to get the games to work, then DOSBox on anything more modern is the way to go. Of note, you bring up your hardware, but you don't even need anything remotely close to a CPU like that to handle it. I'm able to get most later 486 era games to work fine on my old 2-in-1 with its 1.44GHz Atom SoC, so you can probably get it to work well on most modern devices if you have any others. RAM usage has very little overhead, so it's unlikely you'll hit more than something like 100MiB tops in the heaviest DOS games and GPU only matters insofar as if you run anything with Glide it might use just the tiniest bit of a modern GPU (I don't have any handy to test with, but I'd bet on something less than 1% of a GPU like that.) In short, if you can use DOSBox on a modern computer you're pretty much golden no matter what the hardware is -- within reason of course. Of course, if you're running Windows 9x in DOSBox that may be trickier. Not sure how much the requirements scale with that, but I think you'd still be good with most modern hardware. All in all I'd say don't worry about the hardware on modern systems so much as the software (eg stuff like the MIDI device selection in 10 issue we've discussed.)

As for sound emulation, DOSBox has put tons of effort into everything it supports in that regard (for fairly obvious reasons.) From what I have heard from people who know a lot more about it than I do, the OPL emulation is top-notch. (All I know is the games sound like what I guess I remember.) DOSBox also has MT32 emulation for the few games that actually use it (ok, a bunch can technically set it as an output device, but very very few truly use it as anything other than just a barely supported output method. I personally only have three that really do and you already know what one is,) though I think you need a modified SVN compile of the original DOSBox to get MT32 maybe (not sure.) DOSBox-X has it built in anyway. It also has MIDI libraries that can use a SoundFont built in, so that opens up possibilities in that respect as a way to bypass OS MIDI limitations (though, for now, we've at least found some limited mechanisms through which we can still get something other than the MS synthesizer in Windows 10.) If you can use DOSBox, it is in the most technical definition the best option as it gives you better overall support than even real hardware usually could (unless you're super rich and super patient and perhaps even handy with a soldering iron to boot,) but, of course, it doesn't have the same nostalgic feel as sitting in front of an old 486 computer with a loud grindy harddrive and a fat 15" CRT screen in front of you. (Rofl, come to think of it, someone should add harddrive sound emulation to DOSBox! Come on, someone do it!) Pick your poison I guess.

BTW, I remembered what the NTVDM mod was called. VDMSound: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/ YMMV with it, but I recall having great results with it back in the day. If you go with Windows XP on that laptop, you'd probably want to try installing this and the software synthesizer you prefer (probably has to be S-YXG50 rather than 100, but for games it doesn't matter) to get good sound in DOS games when playing them in a command prompt. I found this old guide on this site: Beginner's guide to VDMSound v2.10 Now, it has been a really really long time since I used VDMSound, but I think I recall you could just run it in a command prompt (I think just type vdmsound? There is also an autoexec equivalent in NT that executes when a NTVDM sessions begins that could call the program) if you're like me and don't want to manually run everything with right clicks the way that guide suggests -- though this could theoretically cause issues with some other legacy software (I ran into very little surprisingly enough.) Alternately you could create batch files that could start it then the game rather than a right click menu. It has been a very long time since I used VDMSound, so I may be remembering specifics wrong (but I do remember I had it setup to run automatically with NTVDM in a command prompt so I didn't have to do all that with the right clicking and all.)

Nazo wrote on 2022-04-27, 10:46:

No, Windows 9x doesn't even have the MS synthesizer if I recall. Soundcard drivers won't really "hook into" a software synthesi […]
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No, Windows 9x doesn't even have the MS synthesizer if I recall. Soundcard drivers won't really "hook into" a software synthesizer -- I don't think any ever have anyway. I was only saying there were some examples of some redirecting to physical hardware in a method that almost resembled emulating a soundcard for DOS games as being the closest thing to what you seemed to be looking for. That said, I was getting a bit mixed up between the different subjects being discussed in this thread and thought at first as I wrote that you were using it in a newer version of Windows. The ESS card has its own wavetable synthesizer and what you're getting when you use it with games is that. From what I could tell upon googling, apparently it didn't even have a proper FM synthesizer and used the wavetable to approximate it (apparently badly) so it apparently kind of sucks in general for gaming audio. I suppose from Dell's point of view the laptop was more oriented towards pretty much everything but gaming (remember, gaming laptops are a very recent thing. Back then people used laptops mostly for more business-oriented purposes or at least stuff like typing on the go and etc with gaming just being a sort of side bonus.) Although, if I recall, ESS sound hardware may have been fairly common for laptops back in the day, so it may be Dell wasn't even really making much of a choice one way or the other with it. I'm afraid what you've been experiencing is just the limitations of all the hardware can even do in Windows 9x. From what I could tell upon googling it sounds like that soundcard can't even do MIDI at all in pure DOS either.

DOSBox, as far as I know, can't be used in Windows 9x. Maybe a really really old version, but you'd probably have such awful results from it as to not be worth it. My suggestion was that you might perhaps consider installing Windows 2000 (officially supported on that model) or Windows XP (should still run very well -- especially if you slim it down with XPLite.) And then you may not even need DOSBox because Windows NT versions (including 2000 and XP and newer) uses NTVDM to sort of emulate a DOS system kind of like how DOSBox does (but much much worse.) I can tell you I remember specifically using that third party NTVDM mod that improved things a bit to play DOS games along with the S-YXG50 synthesizer on Windows XP. So my suggestion was to go ahead and go to XP for your best results with MIDI on that system. But do with that as you will. Your options in 9x are going to be severely limited if you don't go the XP route and you'll pretty much just have to make do with whatever you can there. Perhaps a PCMCIA soundcard might help? I'm not really sure what your options are in that regard, but you'll have to look to true hardware solutions for 9x and pure DOS.

Now, I don't know which way you want to go with all this or why you're using that system with Windows 9x. If your purpose is nostalgia in using older hardware running older software then I can understand not going the DOSBox route. Though, of course, if you truly want to do that you need to get actual desktop hardware from the 486 or early Pentium 1 era with ISA slots, an actual ISA videocard and soundcard and etc. If your goal is just to make that system good for retro gaming, then my suggestion remains go to XP and the NTVDM mod, preferably upgrading the RAM to 512MiB for best results (unless it already is 512 of course.) It should be good for a pretty huge range of games then as it has a fairly impressive GPU for a laptop of its era, so you'd have gaming covered for a pretty long range between the two (with perhaps a few compatibility issues here and there since NTVDM never was even close to as accurate or capable as DOSBox.) You can probably find a version of DOSBox that will run on XP (of note, DOSBox-X says something about "low end builds" working on XP even with current versions, but I'm not quite sure how you get such a build -- it may have to be done manually yourself) to play really old games with, but I'm guessing that hardware probably wouldn't handle complex 486-era games well. If your goal is just to get the games to work, then DOSBox on anything more modern is the way to go. Of note, you bring up your hardware, but you don't even need anything remotely close to a CPU like that to handle it. I'm able to get most later 486 era games to work fine on my old 2-in-1 with its 1.44GHz Atom SoC, so you can probably get it to work well on most modern devices if you have any others. RAM usage has very little overhead, so it's unlikely you'll hit more than something like 100MiB tops in the heaviest DOS games and GPU only matters insofar as if you run anything with Glide it might use just the tiniest bit of a modern GPU (I don't have any handy to test with, but I'd bet on something less than 1% of a GPU like that.) In short, if you can use DOSBox on a modern computer you're pretty much golden no matter what the hardware is -- within reason of course. Of course, if you're running Windows 9x in DOSBox that may be trickier. Not sure how much the requirements scale with that, but I think you'd still be good with most modern hardware. All in all I'd say don't worry about the hardware on modern systems so much as the software (eg stuff like the MIDI device selection in 10 issue we've discussed.)

As for sound emulation, DOSBox has put tons of effort into everything it supports in that regard (for fairly obvious reasons.) From what I have heard from people who know a lot more about it than I do, the OPL emulation is top-notch. (All I know is the games sound like what I guess I remember.) DOSBox also has MT32 emulation for the few games that actually use it (ok, a bunch can technically set it as an output device, but very very few truly use it as anything other than just a barely supported output method. I personally only have three that really do and you already know what one is,) though I think you need a modified SVN compile of the original DOSBox to get MT32 maybe (not sure.) DOSBox-X has it built in anyway. It also has MIDI libraries that can use a SoundFont built in, so that opens up possibilities in that respect as a way to bypass OS MIDI limitations (though, for now, we've at least found some limited mechanisms through which we can still get something other than the MS synthesizer in Windows 10.) If you can use DOSBox, it is in the most technical definition the best option as it gives you better overall support than even real hardware usually could (unless you're super rich and super patient and perhaps even handy with a soldering iron to boot,) but, of course, it doesn't have the same nostalgic feel as sitting in front of an old 486 computer with a loud grindy harddrive and a fat 15" CRT screen in front of you. (Rofl, come to think of it, someone should add harddrive sound emulation to DOSBox! Come on, someone do it!) Pick your poison I guess.

BTW, I remembered what the NTVDM mod was called. VDMSound: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/ YMMV with it, but I recall having great results with it back in the day. If you go with Windows XP on that laptop, you'd probably want to try installing this and the software synthesizer you prefer (probably has to be S-YXG50 rather than 100, but for games it doesn't matter) to get good sound in DOS games when playing them in a command prompt. I found this old guide on this site: Beginner's guide to VDMSound v2.10 Now, it has been a really really long time since I used VDMSound, but I think I recall you could just run it in a command prompt (I think just type vdmsound? There is also an autoexec equivalent in NT that executes when a NTVDM sessions begins that could call the program) if you're like me and don't want to manually run everything with right clicks the way that guide suggests -- though this could theoretically cause issues with some other legacy software (I ran into very little surprisingly enough.) Alternately you could create batch files that could start it then the game rather than a right click menu. It has been a very long time since I used VDMSound, so I may be remembering specifics wrong (but I do remember I had it setup to run automatically with NTVDM in a command prompt so I didn't have to do all that with the right clicking and all.)

Sorry Nazo, I thought I replied last week. It was still on draft on my phone!

You are correct on the ESS being quite bad for retro gaming. It sounds fine for most Windows 9x games but falls over at MIDI and FM synth.
Yes, the laptop was aimed more at business MS Office app use but it does play Windows games from the late 90s/early 2000s well.
I tested Half life and it even plays that at reasonable framerates, which is crazy really for a laptop for that era. Dell probably didnt expect people to try playing DOS games like Duke Nukem 3d and worry too much about how the sounded! 😁 They run and work with sound so I guess that was enough.

It came with Win98SE installed but this was never even officially supported, it was designed for XP which is what the sticker shows on the laptop. I kept Win98SE on there primarily because I knew older games could run natively and also always preferred 98 SE over XP, so yes, nostalgia. Games like Need for Speed 2 SE play perfectly. Playing that on a virtual Win98 machine isnt nice.

If I went XP on the Inspiron 8100 then I expect DOSbox-x would probably play games like Duke Nukem 3d quite badly under emulation.
I was looking for a good 'all rounder' laptop to play DOS and early Win 9x game that would replace my now sold retro tower machine that had a Soundblaster 16 ISA card, 3dfx Voodoo 3 and Pentium 3 550Mhz. That machine could play most DOS games perfectly and games upto around 2003. It seems such laptops do not exist 🙁

Am I right in thinking the Serdaco OPL3LPT device would only allow OPL3 midi and no sound effects? That would be an instant no for me which I why I didnt buy one in the past (also needing to mod games to use it)
If it did both FM synth and midi music, then I would get one as that seems like the only solution other than finding and buying a Roland SCP-55 for around £500! I also see the OPL3LPT has a headphone out so so sure how I would wire that back into the laptop for laptop audio output

DOSBox probably won't run great on a ~1GHz P3. The CPU is beefy for its time, but doesn't compare even to modern low end CPUs on a per clock basis. My suggestion was XP with VDMSound for DOS gaming for most games with DOSBox only for much older games with more compatibility issues (for example, Zone66 had its own memory manager and everything and might have issues with NTVDM.) NTVDM and VDMSound is almost closer to wrapping (like WINE) than to true emulation. This is less compatible, but very fast (almost no resource loss.) In fact, it's fast enough that you'll still have trouble with things compiled with that version of Turbo Pascal with the speed bug. With this you could use S-YXG50 for DOS games and most games would run fine so you'd mostly get the best of both worlds.

As for OPL3LPT, that's hard to say for sure. It depends on just how much their drivers are able to "redirect" things essentially. My suspicion is that it could also conflict with your ESS chipset's "emulation" so to speak of a real soundcard (it works a bit more like an AWE type device than a true soundcard.) It may have to be one or the other. If so, then yeah, you'd basically be looking at setting it up to act as an AdLib soundcard. My guess is the only way you could have both is if you did go the XP route and if the drivers let you basically disable the FM synthesizer part (or change the port to something else besides the default.) You'd still have to mix the two outputs because that thing is designed to output analog from the device itself. (Since it's amplified you'll also have to make sure it doesn't output too much voltage for whatever you're feeding it into.)

Honestly I can only see going that route in the most extreme situation if you want the absolute best of the best. You could maybe try a setup like that for perfect FM synthesis in older games that don't support better MIDI. That's a lot of setup to get it all working and costs a fair bit along the way, but it would sound better. However, if you were spending I would say an external SoundBlaster card would make more sense.

I always remember XP being a pain to get some older games running? Games like Duke3d, Blood, Rise of the triad and some newer like Need for Speed did not support XP.
DOS games in XP didnt play nice for me at all, or at least thats how I remember XP. I was however unaware of NTVDM and VDMSound though.
OPL3LPT, i'll not bother as I expect itll conflict with the ESS chip as you say. External soundblasters, I think there is only the Audigy 2ZS which has XP drivers only. I did look at getting that for Win98SE but everything I read stated it wouldnt work on 9X drivers, only XP+

Thanks for your replies 😀

XP SP3 was when the OS went to shit, because they did a lot of changes under the hood in the kernel and processes, due to the security issues that were popping up and that SP broke a lot of games and drivers for soundcards. Before that, I had no issues with older 9x games, though a lot of 95-ME era games were a bit wonky due to the changes in the DirectX APIs and having to figure out OpenGL quirks.

Nah. It's usually FUD'd because that's when the WGA stuff came in.