Hi Falco,
I didn't see that response earlier. I guess vogons stopped senting me notifcation emails for some reason?
I get it that increasing the cap past 4 will require too much work and performance penalty for such a minor feature. So I'll stop mentioning it, I promise.
I never intended to insult your player or call it "old" in any way. I still consider it to be the best standalone MIDI player I know. Spessasynth is still far from the level it achieves, coupled with BASSMIDI. Perfomance is way better and it sounds like a lot more sysExes and NPRNs are supported. I took a ton of inspiration from it, and it taught me a lot about MIDI and especially the old MIDIs, which I try my best to get to sound good in my player, like they do in your software. Take the XG display sysex support for example. The MIDIs you've provided (not sure if it was in this thread, but it was definitely VOGONS) have proven to be very useful in getting the formatting to show properly. Not to mention the massive help from you regarding the sysex stuff with the VBSYX program you've shared with me. I really appreciate it! 😀
Speaking of target audience, I think that spessasynth is intended to be a "little bit of everything." I have no idea who actually uses it or for what (I mostly get just bug reports on GitHub, not much to go of), but it (hopefully) should be able to work both with retro and modern MIDI files more-or-less correctly and be a good all-rounder. And now that you've mentioned it, I totally forgot about the SC-88 multi-port files, I'll add support for these soon, I promise!
Regarding the reprogramming of these files, it's definitely possible to fit most of these into 2-3 ports at most! Especially with using GS drums on to use other channels than ten as drums, because most of the ports come from the multiple drum channels. Though the end user wouldn't really know how to do that... They just click download on the musescore page and expect the thing to work. But, as you've said, FSMP is for listening to regular/retro MIDI files and not the mess that are musescore MIDIs. It still does an exceptional job at it though (take a guess how I discovered them in the first place!)
TL;DR; I get and respect your decision, Falco. I won't mention it anymore. 😀