Yes you can enter any number but I wouldn't recommend it. Go for "9" if in doubt and if you don't want to use "2".

I don't see why IRQ2 would interfere with the mouse. Does disabling MPU emulation (or switching to a bogus IRQ) fix the mouse? What game is the one that exhibits this problem?

V.

Hmm well that whole IRQ 2 has always been strange, since irq 2 doesn't exist in modern machines anymore. The irq is connected to the slave interrupt controller allowing for IRQ 8-15 on AT machines. Don't know how windows handles the mouse but i'd think it would use IRQ 12 or something maybe to signal mouse movement to it's driver. If some program would then screw the master interrupt controller to no longer support IRQ 8-15 through IRQ 2 the mouse would stop functioning.

...but nobody (i.e. not VDMSound) screws with the master PIC. All that VDMSound does is *maybe* trigger IRQ2 (if the MPU has incoming data). So in the worst case the mouse driver (or, more precisely, the "default" IRQ2 handler that dispatches IRQs 8-15 if I'm not mistaken) would wake up on IRQ2, check the slave PIC and see there's nothing there, right? In any case, I've never had this problem with games (I know some Lucas games, i.e. Indy4, would have problems with the mouse not moving under certain situations, but it was more related to memory than anything else IIRC).

V.

Well, at the time, several did it. Now it seems to just be limited to Xanth, but I had removed a few games yesterday and put on others, so I've probably just lost them in the confusion. When I changed the IRQ to anything besides 2 it worked fine. Of course, VDMSound doesn't work entirely right with Xanth according to the compatibility lists and the fact that even after changing the IRQ numbers (in the drivers as well as the game) I got no MIDI output. Then again, the setup program in the game wouldn't go past IRQ7 like so many others out there, though I manually set it to 9, I'm not entirely sure if the game would just ignore that or if it actually could use it when manually specified and the VDMSound drivers appear to only support 2 and 9 as I mentioned before, so, for all I know the problems have been fixed in recent versions and it's just not able to handle the IRQ thing.

I'll try messing with some more of my games to try to figure out exactly what it occurs in, but, the fact is that I just don't have that many games that actually USE the GM IRQ rather than just using the same one as the DSP if any at all.

Oh, and my mouse is a USB mouse and my BIOS is set to enable it's support of USB mice (and keyboards, but I haven't gotten one YET) and it seems to make things that don't support USB use it as a PS/2 mouse, so I get my mouse working even in DOS though it's USB.

The USB contollers are both on IRQ4 according to windows.

Ok, I have a couple more tests to add. I tried the Gateworld games (1 and 2.) Of course, Adlib works without issue, but when I try MT32 emulation, it doesn't work. Possibly this game is one of those that use some of the more advanced things that VDMSound can't emulate, but if so, then that wouldn't explain what happened with GW2. In GW2, if I tried IRQ2, I got no music and no mouse. If I tried IRQ 9 the keyboard and mouse both wouldn't work and I still got no sound. When I tried IRQ 7 the game ran fine, and the keyboard and mouse worked, but, still no music. I tried both with SB emulation on and off, but with MIDI emulation on in each test.

When I tried GW1, when I tried IRQs 2 & 7 it told me that it couldn't find the MT32 hardware (yes, I set up the drivers properly) and when I tried IRQ9 it appeared to have completly locked up. The LED didn't blink, so I doubt it was sending sysex data or anything like that either. I waited a pretty good while on the thing, but, eventually had to give up.

(These games can be found on the-underdogs website if anyone wants to test VDMSound with them themselves.)

EDIT: Oh, and I'm sorry, I forgot I should have followed those posting guidelines. Perhaps some of the info will help:

-CPU: AMD Athlon 1.4GHz (TB, not XP)
-Motherboard: MSI K7T133, which seems to actually be pretty darned good.
-Sound card: Actually, two. Yamaha YXG744 (give or take a few 10s) and a Sound Blaster Live! I set the default device for digital audio to the Yamaha since SBLive's digital audio sucks (no, let's not get into a battle over this please,) and I set the MIDI to the SBLive for the soundfonts.
Memory: I installed XP when I had 256, now I have 512. I know that Win9x never properly took advantage of more memory when you upgraded, but perhaps XP doesn't have that problem. I can't really be sure since I had enough ram to get the same basic performance before, so it's not like upgrading from, say, 64 to 256.
-Video card: Gainward Ultra/650XP Golden Sample (a Geforce 4 Ti-4200 with 128MB of ram, vivo, and DVI)
-Video mode: actually, it didn't occur to me at the time that it could be an issue. I told the games to use SVGA rather than VGA, and things seemed fine. As soon as I get a chance, I'll try them in VGA and see if it affects things.
-Operating system: Windows XP Proffessional (corporate version.)
-Reproduction of the problem: it happens every time I've tried it, which is quite a few.

I think Xanth works fine now (with VDMSound 2.0.4)
The trouble with Legend games is that they use the "Intelligent" mode of the MPU-401 for MT-32 music. I couldn't find a single shred of documentation about the intelligent mode (i.e. I have the list of commands, but I have no idea about the behaviour and replies behind them). I tried to rev-eng one of the Legend games to see if I can trick it into detecting MT-32 intelligen mode (although it's not implemented), but it's not too obvious. I'll try again tonight (if I don't forget), I really wanted to hear it (BTW, you can rip all MIDI files from Legen Games and listen to them in WIndows, though I'm not sure if they are GM or MT-32; I got used to them as GM and now they sound weird if I send them to the MT-32 from Media Player, so it would be interesting to see if the game converts them from GM to MT-32 or if it keeps them "as-is").

Oh, yeah, most Legend games also give you an "alternate" mouse mode (xmouse) -- try that as well, see if it makes a difference. I have no idea what's going on behind the scenes with xmouse, though. Disable MIDI emulation altogether for Legend games that give MT-32 emulation error (e..g the Gateways, Timequest, Eric the Unready, *maybe* Superhero League of Hoboken as well, and the Spellcastings) for the moment being. For Deathgate and *I think* Superhero League of Hoboken choose GM for MIDI (it works fine there).

V.

As usual: did you check with Google?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Intelligent … ilter=0&num=100
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Intelligent … ilter=0&num=100
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Intellig … m=100&scoring=d
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22Intellig … um=100&filter=0

What are you looking for exactly?

How does one extract those songs?

And, yes, I've tried XMouse. The only difference I ever saw was that (at the times that the mouse worked either with or without it) was that the xmouse driver caused the cursor to jump around like insane and made it much harder to click on certain buttons. (Not a slowdown type jump, but more like half the resolution or something.)

Stiletto wrote:

As usual: did you check with Google?

Numerous times. 😀

Anyway, I half-guessed around some stuff and Legend games now start OK with the MT-32 (it is detected and even the SysEx's get uploaded -- but there is no music, probably something to do with MPU timers that I don't emulate yet [properly], we shall see).

V.

Gateway works fine for me (the mouse is OK with MIDI enabled on IRQ2 and no command-line switches other than "MT32"). Timequest and Spellcasting 101 have "frozen" cursors though. Weird...
V.

OK, I released an update for the MPU module (see "XP & IT & MIDI" or thread) that will make Legend games half-detect the emulation. Turns out (1) Windows' emulation of IRQ2 is crap (or I don't know how to program ISRs, one or the other -- I never get IRQ2 from the VDD, and neither does the game, but the mouse seems to get stuck), and (2) Windows' default handler for IRQ5, 7, etc. does not have an EOI in it so switching to an IRQ other than 2 will result in the first detection round working OK and all subsequent detection rounds failing (because the PIC is stuck waiting for EOI [[EDIT: and the game's ISR chains to the old, default ISR which doesn't perform the EOI]]). I developed a patch for (2) that works on at least two of the games with problems (Spell Casting 101 and Gateway 1), and the sysex's get uploaded properly to my MT-32 (I even read "Legend Entertainment" and "GATEWAY" on the display), but there is no music data coming through. I'm afraid it may be a lost cause. 🙁

V.

Why do you think it's a lost cause? Nothing's a lost cause to the great Vlad! (Speaking of MT-32, how's that emulation coming? *cough,ahhem* 😉)

Unregistered wrote:

How does one extract those songs?

No idea.

And, yes, I've tried XMouse. The only difference I ever saw was that (at the times that the mouse worked either with or without it) was that the xmouse driver caused the cursor to jump around like insane and made it much harder to click on certain buttons. (Not a slowdown type jump, but more like half the resolution or something.)

Reminds me of the Xmouse utility included with the original Windows PowerToys (which included TweakUI).
It was supposed to "make the focus follow the mouse without clicking, a la X-Windows".

To rip the MIDI look on the web for a midi-rip program (they will just look for MThd and MTrk and extract the data around that).

V.

Try Game Audio Player

RIPMID by Julien Pierre works very well (worked with Legend games). See attachment.

Snover wrote:

Try Game Audio Player[/url]

Only problem is that .MID files (IIRC) are about the only audio format that GAP doesn't support. If there's any digital audio (of just about any format) however, it will find that.

Updated v1.32 is available at the "official" Russian site:
http://bim.km.ru/gap/

Note: GAP seems great for just about all of the 32Bit games, but seems to have a harder time with the really old ones
IE: Couldn't find anything in Blood, but found tons of stuff in Blood2 (Including _LOTS_ of audio I NEVER heard during the game and I'm rather curious as to what was going on...).