Personal computing discussed
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Hz so good wrote:There was an MT-32 emulator in the works for Dosbox (I think ScummVM absorbed it?), does anybody know how far along it is?
Hz so good wrote:On a side note, could I use a Roland Sound Canvas with Dosbox?
jihadjoe wrote:Have you tried MUNT? Also (IIRC) there's a guy who made an MT-32 soundfont set for DOSbox. Can't seem to find it at the moment but I remember downloading it back in 2012.
morphine wrote:If I'm thinking right, then one could obtain the MT-32 sample set and use it in the Windows MIDI device.
derFunkenstein wrote:I reroute DOSBox MIDI to VirtualMIDISynth on the rare occasion I feel like playing a DOS game with MIDI. I also use it for general MIDI playback, which doesn't happen very often anymore.
morphine wrote:In that case, you can try to do what I did back in the day when I used a hardware GUS - they had this MT-32 emulator that worked pretty darn well. So you can fire up Dosbox with a GUS, set up the MT-32 emu, and presto. In fact, I have to try that myself one of these days.
Hz so good wrote:You can do that? COOL!!! Will I need to use the original (hard to find) MT-32 LA banks, or does the GUS use it's own patches for it?
morphine wrote:Hz so good wrote:You can do that? COOL!!! Will I need to use the original (hard to find) MT-32 LA banks, or does the GUS use it's own patches for it?
IIRC the GUS had its own patch banks. I think you could hack them though, but it's been like... 17-18 years The software you're looking for is "Megaem".
Gravis Ultrasound fansite
Back in the day I ran both an SB-16 and a GUS, so I didn't run into the SB emulation issues Managing IRQs and DMA channels, however... sigh.
Hz so good wrote:I remember that well. The SBEmu TSR just destroyed sub 640KB memory.
morphine wrote:Hz so good wrote:There was an MT-32 emulator in the works for Dosbox (I think ScummVM absorbed it?), does anybody know how far along it is?
No idea, but that's not necessarily a great idea. Since you can redirect MIDI from Dosbox to any external device, there are a million better things that sound better than the MT-32. If I'm thinking right, then one could obtain the MT-32 sample set and use it in the Windows MIDI device.Hz so good wrote:On a side note, could I use a Roland Sound Canvas with Dosbox?
You mean using the physical card? If you can get it running in your Windows host, you can do as described above. In theory, it should sound the same.
morphine wrote:Hz so good wrote:I remember that well. The SBEmu TSR just destroyed sub 640KB memory.
I'm sorry that you sucked so bad at managing memory
I take it you never got deep into upper memory, loading order, the B000-B7FF block, etc?
morphine wrote:They made a bunch of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Sound_Canvas
morphine wrote:If I may be a little arrogant, I sometimes helped out a friend's PC shop, and was routinely tasked with freeing up the 640KB block because nobody in a many-mile radius could do it as precisely. Sometimes they came in saying "but I used Memmaker!"
In all honesty, though, it was more about using that extra monochrome video RAM block, loading order and picking the right drivers than anything else. Managed to have almost all of those 640KB free with soundcard, CD-ROM, mouse and Smartdisk enabled. IIRC the Oak cd-rom driver was the smallest, and I think the mouse driver I used was from Unisys. A lot of trial-and-error went into coming up with the exact formula.
Hz so good wrote:Memmaker? Why, back in my day we used EMM386 and HIMEM.sys and we liked it! And we also had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow.
Hz so good wrote:I don't miss having to keep track of multiple bootdisks for individual games.
morphine wrote:Hz so good wrote:Memmaker? Why, back in my day we used EMM386 and HIMEM.sys and we liked it! And we also had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow.
Memmaker *is* the joke. It was a DOS program that tried its best to get you as much free lower RAM as it could. And people tried it, but it often was a case of "close, but no cigar".Hz so good wrote:I don't miss having to keep track of multiple bootdisks for individual games.
Man, you never heard of config/autoexec multiple boot configurations? I feel for you, brother.
morphine wrote::lol:
Relax, I'm just poking fun. At the time most stuff was black magic to me.
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Pardon my late participation, but I don't think MT-32 sound banks can handle games with MT-32 sysex. It seems software emulation like Munt can do it better in that regards, and IIRC the latest version of MT-32 ROM dump Munt uses is difficult to discern from a real MT-32.
As for Sound Canvas, well, it's true that Roland Virtual Sound Canvas doesn't sound as good as the real hardware, but I've switched to Sound Font. Certain Sound Font combo like SGM, Drums! by Slavo, and Bellatrix Orchestra sounds better than a real LAPC IMO.
Hz so good wrote:Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Pardon my late participation, but I don't think MT-32 sound banks can handle games with MT-32 sysex. It seems software emulation like Munt can do it better in that regards, and IIRC the latest version of MT-32 ROM dump Munt uses is difficult to discern from a real MT-32.
As for Sound Canvas, well, it's true that Roland Virtual Sound Canvas doesn't sound as good as the real hardware, but I've switched to Sound Font. Certain Sound Font combo like SGM, Drums! by Slavo, and Bellatrix Orchestra sounds better than a real LAPC IMO.
I was wondering about the sysex, since some of the original Sierra Online adventure games relied on the bugs found in the original MT-32, and sound odd on the newer rev (non-headphone jack one). I think they also used it to display messages on the LCD, but that won't do me any good, since I lack the actual hardware.
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Hz so good wrote:Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:Pardon my late participation, but I don't think MT-32 sound banks can handle games with MT-32 sysex. It seems software emulation like Munt can do it better in that regards, and IIRC the latest version of MT-32 ROM dump Munt uses is difficult to discern from a real MT-32.
As for Sound Canvas, well, it's true that Roland Virtual Sound Canvas doesn't sound as good as the real hardware, but I've switched to Sound Font. Certain Sound Font combo like SGM, Drums! by Slavo, and Bellatrix Orchestra sounds better than a real LAPC IMO.
I was wondering about the sysex, since some of the original Sierra Online adventure games relied on the bugs found in the original MT-32, and sound odd on the newer rev (non-headphone jack one). I think they also used it to display messages on the LCD, but that won't do me any good, since I lack the actual hardware.
Well I've never experience such bugs with Munt. Even Ultima Underworld - which is said to be picky (regarding to whether it's MT-32 or CM-32L) - sounds flawlessly with Munt.