General MIDI/MPU-401 allows you to use the port built into your sound card to generate the electrical signals for MIDI work, but you need a device that can receive and decode them into sound. This can be in the form of a daughter card, external module, sound card with integrated MIDI synthesis, or an external computer which performs MIDI synthesis in software.

I understand that. I have it going out to my SC-55MkII. I am saying that under DOS if I select a general MIDI device, digitized sound (soundblaster) does not seem to work, but the MIDI works fine

Pintsize12433 wrote:

I understand that. I have it going out to my SC-55MkII. I am saying that under DOS if I select a general MIDI device, digitized sound (soundblaster) does not seem to work, but the MIDI works fine

Your description of the issue sounds like it's happening in games. Which games?

Staticblast wrote:

Your description of the issue sounds like it's happening in games. Which games?

Does this happen with something like Doom, which definitely does support digital audio with simultaneous MIDI. Not every title supports both at once.

Many games do not support both simultaneously. Please give a bit more detail about your problems, equipment, and games/software in use instead of having us pull it from you.

How do you have the audio out from your SC-55 getting to your speakers?
Which game are you trying to use?

My SC-55 is going through the line in on my soundcard (Yamaha Audician currently) The midi playback from the SC-55 seems to not have any issues at all, there is just no digitized sound while MIDI is enabled. I have tried Boppin, DOOM, Duke Nukem 3d (the setup program plays back both just fine, but once in game with simultaneous usage there is no digitized sound effects) Warcraft (there is a strange sound coming from the card, almost like an IRQ problem but I am not sure). Descent and Dark Forces seem to work just fine with MIDI music and Digital sound effects.

Doom will have both MIDI and SFX if I launch it from Windows 95

I am using emm386 4.95 and have 32mb of ram if that matters.

Thanks for the input!

"Like an IRQ problem"... what IRQ is MIDI set to? 2/9 should be fine, but if you have it set to 5 while the SB IRQ is also 5 that might be acusing your problems.

That aside it could be some kind of mixer problem. Maybe worth trying with the SC-55 connected directly to external speakers, not via the Line-In.

I did not know i could change the MIDI interrupt. How would I go about doing that on my AWE64? Is it under the SET Blaster?

AWE64 doesn't use a MIDI interrupt. That's only an issue for Roland and compatible intelligent mode cards.

Out of curiosity, since you're doing midi via gameport, are you running SoftMPU?

EDIT: also, perhaps refer to this thread, where they discuss similar midi issues on an AWE64, though not exactly the same, it might provide some clues.

I am not using SoftMPU (I have tried it and it does not change anything for doom). With my AWE64 CT 4390 and my AWE32 CT3990 Doom basically locks up (takes about 30 sec for the menu to show up and another 30 sec to quit) if I have Sound blaster as my sound device and Sound Canvas as my music device. I have tried both cards on 2 486DX2 computers, a 486SX with a 487 in it, Pentium 166. I believe that it also locks up on my Pentium 3 550. I have tried a mix of MS-DOS 6.22 and DOS 7.1 as a boot option under windows 95. I do not have any problems though if I actually launch doom from windows 95 though. I am playing The Ultimate DOOM 1.9

It turns out the problem was I had the MIDI input plugged into the soundcard aswell. I had no problems with the MT-32, but my SC-55MKII would lock up the computer if the MIDI in was also plugged in. A very odd problem