Hi,
> On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 12:15:54PM +0100, Christoph Reichenbach wrote:
> > turns out that my system only locks up if patches are loaded before the
> > game starts, so I tried LSL2 and KQ4 (which don't use patch.001,
> Hmm. The patch needs to load before the game starts!
Well, it's possible that it does, but both games use the default MT-32
settings, so there's not much to load for them.
> Becauxe the
> sound server is in another process, the main game loop has no way of
> knowing that it needs to wait for the sound server to finish
> initializing. It seemed like the best place to do the dump.
Yes, that's perfectly OK. I guess the "best possible" solution would be to
load the patch asynchronously and block as soon as actual audio output is
requested (although this might lead to some games blocking at an
inappropriate point in their intro; we'd have to test for that).
> > However, both title songs appeared to continute playing even after they
> > should have finished; there may be a small bug in looping.
> Hmm. That I'm not so sure about -- (I still haven't hooked it up to my
> MT32 yet, so sho wknows...) I think it has to do with the way th eeound
> events are processed by the main game loop; ie asynchronously.
Possibly, but it's also possible that we're mis-interpreting the loop
selector (or something like that). After all, the music should play
exactly once, so there's not much of a point (for the game designers) to
make it loop...
> > Also, I noticed that HQ didn't crash; it didn't attempt to load patches,
> > either. This may be related to the open problem of HQ possibly detecting
> > the audio device in some way, as some songs appear to be stored twice for
> > different output devices (below 100 for most synths, 100 and above for
> > Tandy and PC speaker). This is, of course, just a theory; any thoughts on
> > this?
> Thie doesn't hold much water IMO, because the sound server is pretty
> much hardwired to use patch.001 -- the game itself doesn't know (or
> care!) which sound device is being used. Unless I'm really missing
> something obvious.
OK; is the sound server hardwired to load the patch /before/ the
interpreter starts, or only if DoSound() is called (possibly with some
parameters)?
> IIRC, *all* SCI games that use the MT32 load something into the synth.
> (or at least every MT32 midi file that came of Quest Studio's page has a
> sysex bank in there..)
Possible, although I'm pretty sure that KQ4 and LSL2 use the default
timbre settings in the MT-32. Still, neither HQ1 nor QfG1 give any audio
output on my box.
> Anyhoo. I'm just glad things work, mostly.
Hey, it's great! :-)
Except for the part where my system locks up, but that's not exactly your
fault ;->
llap,
Christoph
