Hello, On 08/12/2014 02:07 AM, Rugxulo wrote: > I regret that I don't have a (reliably) working P166 anymore since it > had AWE64. That would've been vaguely interesting (even to a soundcard > noob like me).
I have a SB AWE64, too! :) In fact, this was the first reason why I started coding DOSMid. I always liked MIDI files, unfortunately, on most of my computers they sounded... no so well. That's only recently that I (re)discovered MIDI capabilities of my SBAWE64, and I was amazed by the MIDI quality on it. I see people saying that AWE64 is no reference, and that there are better cards out there, I wonder how they sound. I bought an Aztech card with an embedded wavetable a few days ago, just to compare (still waiting for the postman). Anyway, AWE cards have one ugly problem: they don't have any real MPU-401 interface, which makes things hacky - the MPU emulation is provided by a TSR called 'AWEUTIL' that translates MPU-401 calls to its native 'EMU8000' chip, and it's not super stable sometimes (esp. when running protected mode, and/or using XMS memory). > The real question (although arguably not what DOS386 wants to hear) is > what modern emulators it works under. I think that there's no big point in listening to MIDI on emulated stuff. It sounds so great only on a real thing... > I assume DOSBox is okay. I wonder about VirtualBox or QEMU. DOSBox works, but requires a software MIDI synth (I used fluidsynth with success - but again, it sounds poor compared to a real quality MIDI card, even though soundfont nowadays are 20x bigger - that's yet another mystery of life, how today's stuff with plenty of RAM, CPU and what not can sound crappy compared to a card built 20 years ago with 1MB of ROM samples...). VirtualBox - haven't tried, wouldn't believe it can make MIDI anyway. It fails on much "simpler" things. QEMU - haven't tried to play MIDI on it, who knows. > http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=9134#p9137 Nice list - there aren't many MIDI DOS players out there, esp. when considering "four freedoms". > http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=sound > > So whatever. I'll have to test this later. Feel free to "import" an > .LSM of "DOSMid" to the "SOUND" section once it stabilizes (or I'll do > it if you can't). I don't think I have access to this LSM-computing stuff (and don't think I need such access, unless we could integrate it with FDNPKG repos, which sounds totally possible) > P.S. I just double-checked, and SoftMPU was updated two months ago Cool piece of software, but I don't think it's much about "playing MIDI files", it seems to be an emulator providing the MPU's "Intelligent" mode for cards that don't support it (most cards don't have it as far as I know, maybe only the Roland stuff had it - but there are very few games that really need it also, since the 'intelligent' mode was more a tool for trackers). ciao Mateusz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
