First post, by LSS10999
The driver I'm using for Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI (CMI8738-based) doesn't have MIDI support on NT 3.51. I don't know if there were ever a driver that supported MIDI, so I've been looking for a usable software MIDI synth solution to take its place, but I'm yet to find one that can properly run on such an old OS.
So far I managed to get Yamaha S-YXG50 (NT version) partially working on NT 3.51. You at least need the following prerequisites to get S-YXG50 usable:
- PSAPI.DLL/IMAGEHLP.DLL from up to Win2000 (optionally DBGHELP.DLL)
- DSOUND.DLL from up to DirectX 8.0a (NT)*.
* After some thorough dependency walking, it seems all the DirectSound 8 and DirectMusic 8 libraries I could find have no dependency issues (though bugs may exist) on NT 3.51. S-YXG50 only needs DSOUND.DLL.
Not all DSOUND.DLL versions can be used, so check it with Dependency Walker first. I only checked the related DirectX DLL files at the moment, but for proper operation additional files and a lot of registry entries need to be added, yet NT 3.51 itself doesn't seem to offer a trivial way to insert the registry entries in bulk.
The installer for S-YXG50 (NT version) runs without issues. If all the dependencies required by the soft synth drivers are met, you should be able to choose it in MIDI Mapper after reboot.
Unfortunately it currently only works correctly within XGPlayer and can't properly play any music outside it, such as in games, as well as Windows' stock Media Player. I don't know if this is an issue with the soft synth itself, or it is an limitation with NT 3.51 itself.
Other than the S-YXG50, is there any other soft synth solution that can be properly used with older Windows like NT 3.51, as a system-wide MIDI option?