I'm a bit confused. Why not play MIDI files on your Win 10 machine and listen there?

Im primarily intending to use this to run msdos games with midi support from within windows 98se. I was just playing the midi music files as a another test point and I found it interesting that they seem to sound as expected.
My end goal will be to use a mt32-pi as the midi synth, but im working on putting it together. So for the time Im just using another PC like i described above.

Pickle wrote on 2021-09-16, 01:36:

HI im hoping someone can clear some of the details of what is happening with a new setup i have been trying out. […]
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HI im hoping someone can clear some of the details of what is happening with a new setup i have been trying out.

Im using a PCMCIA EXP Traveller Game / Midi card. This allows for a Midi device in windows. I have it selected as my single instrument midi device in windows 98.
Fortunately the device allows mapping to address 0x250. It defaulted to 0x260 and many setup's dont allow it.
I connected the midi in/out to a roland mu-one to another PC. On the other PC i have run qsynth (fluidsynth) on linux and falcosoft midiplayer in WIndows 10.

So it generally is working fine, but the instruments just dont seem right. Mainly i get a grand piano type instrument. For example the doom main melody is with this, so its the right notes, but just sounds off.
One way i can work around this is by using qsynth remapping options to force the channel to use some other instrument and create a preset.
Another game that sounds off is Abuse, but then i play some age of empires midi files and those sound perfect.

But im trying to understand why this is happening. Since this is fluidsynth and ive used this with dosbox ece and with the same sound fonts it sounds no where close.
So is windows remapping (or maybe the term is patching?) the instruments? Or is it somehow the EXP card.

One thing im a little disappointing in this card is no native dos support for midi. The only dos driver only enables the game port options.

You said you used FSMP in Windows 10. In version 6 of FSMP you can capture Midi data from Midi input so you can inspect the differences (compared to a proper sounding Midi file of the same song). You have to use the Event viewer/Debugger dialog of FSMP to capture/compare.
You can also attach the recorded Midi file into this thread. Thus I could examine your dump and maybe give some hints about what can be the problem.

Ok i turned on the record and then started doom, so this is part of the opening music.

Pickle wrote on 2021-09-16, 13:58:

Ok i turned on the record and then started doom, so this is part of the opening music.

Hi,
The problem is obvious. Something is filtering Program Change messages. Your dump contains zero program change messages overall including all channels. It's interesting since the most problematic types of Midi messages that some cheap cables are notorious to mess up are SysEx messages and not Program Change ( and you got the famous GM ON SysEx message from Doom in your dump). Program Change messages have only 1 somewhat different property compared to most other short Midi messages: namely they use only 2 bytes instead of 3.
So you should examine if there is something that filters explicitly Program Change messages, or other settings that can affect 2 byte Midi short messages in general. I have attached a Doom startup dump from DosBox also recorded by FSMP so you can compare it to yours. In the Event Viewer/Debugger you can set 'Filters' to 'Program + Bank Changes'. This way you can clearly see the difference.

yeah i saw that its odd i didnt see any program changes.
I don think it has to do anything with the roland um-one since Ive used that from an MPU 401 to the midiplayer on Windows XP. And i used it on the mt32-rpi test setup. Everything was sounding fine there.
So i really suspect it has to be the pcmcia EXP card. Unfortunately I dont really find anything I can change that i think would effect this. I can only change the resources from 3 configs. But that only sets the port and irq.
I did some searching through registry but i dont really see anything i would be confident in changing.
The driver for the card looks to be using the virtual device drivers (configmg.vxd) from windows and those must interface to a drv file provided by EXP.
Ive run this on 2 laptops both with windows 98. One is a toshiba tecra that has a built in XG general midi and the XG device works as expected. So that also suggests the EXP card and not windows.
One other thing I ran the age of empires midi track with debug and I did record one program change.

to add to the oddity of this i took your doom midi file and played it with windows media player on the win98 machine and it played correct.

another strange thing I was going to use Cloudschatze's hacked doom exe's for the serial output and those are working on the EXP card correctly.