Hi,

> I have an MT-32. Getting and editing the patches is not hard. A full
> emulation is probably not possible because, like you said, what Roland will
> give us is too limited. We would need to distribute all of the Sierra
> patches, but I beleave there is a patch librarian for DOS that already has
> all of the Sierra patches.

Sorry, I used an incorrect term there; I was referring to the PCM data
rather than the patches (which are part of the patch.001 resource present
in practically all SCI games).

Anyway, I couldn't find the PCM data in either of the MT-32's removeable
EPROMs (there were two in my model, Rickard's MT-32 only has one of them
removeable), so that's the real problem (and this is what I meant).

> Working Timidity into FreeSCI is another story. I can get the patches, but
> Timidity is a stand alone MIDI player and FreeSCI will be generating a
> real-time MIDI streem.

IIRC, the timidity internals have been abstracted somewhat; I think I've
seen a libtimidity somewhere.

> It seems like a multi-threading job.

The easiest way to handle this (on *NIX) would be fork()/execve() with
some pipes or socket pairs in between. However, we'll have to accomodate
for actual PCM samples in SCI01 and later; this isn't a problem on Linux
with ALSA, but that's about the only target platform that will support
it.
Unless there /is/ a libtimidity, we'd need to modify the actual timidity
for that (adding everything listed on the MT-32's MIDI implementation
chart, if it isn't there all ready, and the stuff from page 25 of the
MT-32 owner's manual). This would be possible (both technically and
legally, since timidity is lgpl'd).

> We need a good
> hacker. Does anybody want to do that?

First, we need the PCMs. According to the Owner's manual, there are
supposed to be 128 of them.

Other than that, you should leave the process/thread separation to
Rickard's code, which is intended to make things much more modular than
the current sound infrastructure allows for.
Therefore, the only thing remaining to be done is a software
implementation of the MT-32, possibly using (parts of) timidity.

This leaves the question of "who will do it if/when we get the PCMs (or 
similar ones) and the permission to distribute them".
I guess asking for volunteers should wait until after that precondition is
met.

llap,
 Christoph


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