First post, by Nazo
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This is probably impossible for some very obvious reasons, but I would still like to put this out there for possible consideration. I've had the S-YXG50 synthesizer for a VERY long time now. (It actually came free with some game or soundcard a long time ago and I don't even remember where I got it from anymore. I even used to have a nice little slip of paper complete with watermarks or logos with the serial number on it, though sadly it didn't survive my latest move.) For me at least, the S-YXG50 synthesizer has sounded better for DOS games than anything else I've tried. That includes TiMiDity (though I've never really gotten a satisfactory configuration I was really happy with in it) and Creative's soundcards. My last Creative card had over 100MB in soundfonts loaded all the time even and generic MIDIs sounded absolutely great, but still DOS games just plain sounded better through the S-YXG50 synthesizer no matter how I played around with the soundfonts to try to get it better. (I couldn't really say what was missing. Just somehow Yamaha's XG synthesizer seems to fit DOS games better even though it may technically have lower quality samples and such compared to those soundfonts I tried.) Similarly, after a lot of work I managed to get the Gravis Ultrasound emulation in DOSBox working and started trying it in a number of later games that directly supported the GUS cards, but even then I still found that using General MIDI through the S-YXG50 the games just sounded best for me.
Unfortunately, this is becoming a problem. First, it's very hard even to find the versions that actually work with Windows XP as the software was already dying out by then (the more advanced S-YXG100 completely stopped without ever working in NT5+ I think, but it was more for development anyway so I didn't really mind it as much.) As far as I'm aware you can't get it to work with Vista or 7 at all even in 32-bit mode. As people switch to 64-bit systems, even if that were possible it will become completely impossible though. Of course, I doubt anyone ever got it to work in Linux at all even with WINE since it acts as a driver (I'll admit I rarely use Linux for any sort of gaming at all though, so can't say much in that respect.) The closest thing I could ever do was find a "driver" version of TiMiDity for my 64-bit 7 setup which, as I said earlier, just can not compare to the S-YXG50 synthesizer for me at least. Basically ,the problem comes down to the fact that MIDI is being less and less supported not just by modern hardware (most modern soundcards can't even do anything with MIDI via partially software methods like Creative's cards can do and just rely on MS's low quality Roland emulator. I don't even know what Linux users are doing at this point for MIDI since the last time I seriously listened to MIDI in Linux I still had one of those Creative cards that were at least decently supported in Linux.) I think that eventually relying on external sources for MIDI synthesizing is getting pretty unattainable. In much the way OPL2/3 emulation is built in rather than relying on the host's soundcard to support it, I think General MIDI needs to at least partially go this direction for the sake of future computers.
What I'm wondering is if there couldn't be any sort of actual emulation of a DB50XG board that maybe uses some data from the S-YXG50 software in much the same manner that the MT-32 emulation borrows ROM dumps from a MT-32. This might perhaps solve some of the licensing issues by requiring that the user actually supply the licensed stuff themselves.
This may be unrealistic though. Assuming it is impossible, I'm also suggesting that it might be beneficial to "emulate" a generic GM compatible wavetable card. I think DOSBox already does quite a lot of this on its own, but obviously the actual synthesizer itself isn't present. For this, I think TiMiDity++ code could surely be borrowed in much the way ScummVM already does this? I'd imagine some nice people would probably even come up with good free soundfont setups that would be suitable for DOS gaming, but there are several free soundfont compilations out there that at least are good starting places. I'm no programmer, but I believe that this would actually not be that hard to implement since a lot of the basics are already in place and it probably wouldn't have to do much more than borrow a bit from TiMiDity++ itself. Since General MIDI is so generic (if only more standards could be so universal,) it wouldn't really have to emulate any actual hardware any more than what it already basically does when using the Windows MIDI mapper.
