Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hi, I confess I haven't tried to compile your tetris clone, but have a few suggestions: - you definitely should try to avoid these nasty BGI drivers... (doesn't it clash with GPL anyway? I'm pretty sure it will, when you will want to distribute an executable package), - using a standard Makefile might be easier for many people than the PRJ stuff (and faster to compile, no need to run the whole IDE), - how about putting a screenshot somewhere? - would be nice if you could distribute a pre-compiled version of the game. I think this would be more appealing for people to try out, than to have to compile it. Most gamers don't use a compiler very often (if at all). BTW, fun fact: only 32% of your sources is code. all the rest is... its license :D cheers, Mateusz On 08/12/2014 11:31 PM, Jaroslav Beran wrote: Hi Mateusz, I saw some possibility of creating dll in case of watcom but didnt sure if it is usable under dos. I understand well that BSD license allowes me to do many thinks with you code. But idea is to provide api as shared or static library and keep it under maintenance. In the past I read here about idea to do the same with tcp stack. Ok, this activity will not affect legacy software, but it would be nice to have library collection for new or active projects. In such case all we can yield all synergies from shared code (shared knowledge, maintenance, and so on) I dont know if my game (another tetris) will really make happy somebody but you can find it here:-) https://bitbucket.org/berk76/tetris Original aim was to play with TC 2.01 and FreeDos and test their possibilities. Now I would like to add some additional improvements like playing background sound and so on. Jarda 2014-08-12 22:54 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr mailto:mate...@viste.fr: Hi Jarda Actually, there is no such thing like a shared library in DOS. Nonetheless, you can of course reuse DOSMid code (BSD, no strings attached). I wrote it so code reusal shall be easy - if you look into it, there are specialized modules for everything. The midi.c module would be the closest thing to a MIDI library. Simply snap it into your project and include its header file. You should also find usage explanations in the header. Let me know if anything is unclear, I will gladly help integrating DOSMid into your project (and improve its documentation if such need arise). Note however, that you should probably not rely on MPU for music. Most el cheapo soundcards don't have a wavetable onboard, its something found only in high-end cards. Using midi is probably a good idea (and you are welcome to use dosmid for midi loading) but I think you should rely on FM synth (0x388 IIRC) for playback, or provide a configurable setting to the user: MPU/FM. Of course FM quality is poor, but should be acceptable for a game tune (and better than no music at all for sure). Btw, any chance to find the beta of your game somewhere on the net already? Mateusz On August 12, 2014 10:16:15 PM GMT+02:00, Jaroslav Beran jaroslav.be...@gmail.com mailto:jaroslav.be...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am working on some small game and one of points in my todo list is to enable play background music. One possibility is to grab similar project. But better way would be to use shared library if it is possible. So my question is do you plan provide also shared library? :-) Jarda 2014-08-10 13:16 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr mailto:mate...@viste.fr: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its stable, and plays all my MIDI files right. It doesn't come with many features yet, though. I tested it only on my SoundBlaster 64 AWE card, as well as with my MIDI piano keyboard, and it worked well with both. Unfortunately I don't have any other MIDI hardware, but there's no reason I am aware of that would make it non-functional with other hardware, as long as MPU-401 compatibility is there. enjoy!
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hello Mateusz, thank you for your suggestions. This project is not ready for distribution and it is still in progress. Back to the original question. If I understand well you dont plan to publish api as library. In my opinion it is quite pity because there is potential for reusing it in other projects. Jarda 2014-08-13 19:47 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr: Hi, I confess I haven't tried to compile your tetris clone, but have a few suggestions: - you definitely should try to avoid these nasty BGI drivers... (doesn't it clash with GPL anyway? I'm pretty sure it will, when you will want to distribute an executable package), - using a standard Makefile might be easier for many people than the PRJ stuff (and faster to compile, no need to run the whole IDE), - how about putting a screenshot somewhere? - would be nice if you could distribute a pre-compiled version of the game. I think this would be more appealing for people to try out, than to have to compile it. Most gamers don't use a compiler very often (if at all). BTW, fun fact: only 32% of your sources is code. all the rest is... its license :D cheers, Mateusz On 08/12/2014 11:31 PM, Jaroslav Beran wrote: Hi Mateusz, I saw some possibility of creating dll in case of watcom but didnt sure if it is usable under dos. I understand well that BSD license allowes me to do many thinks with you code. But idea is to provide api as shared or static library and keep it under maintenance. In the past I read here about idea to do the same with tcp stack. Ok, this activity will not affect legacy software, but it would be nice to have library collection for new or active projects. In such case all we can yield all synergies from shared code (shared knowledge, maintenance, and so on) I dont know if my game (another tetris) will really make happy somebody but you can find it here:-) https://bitbucket.org/berk76/tetris Original aim was to play with TC 2.01 and FreeDos and test their possibilities. Now I would like to add some additional improvements like playing background sound and so on. Jarda 2014-08-12 22:54 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr mailto:mate...@viste.fr: Hi Jarda Actually, there is no such thing like a shared library in DOS. Nonetheless, you can of course reuse DOSMid code (BSD, no strings attached). I wrote it so code reusal shall be easy - if you look into it, there are specialized modules for everything. The midi.c module would be the closest thing to a MIDI library. Simply snap it into your project and include its header file. You should also find usage explanations in the header. Let me know if anything is unclear, I will gladly help integrating DOSMid into your project (and improve its documentation if such need arise). Note however, that you should probably not rely on MPU for music. Most el cheapo soundcards don't have a wavetable onboard, its something found only in high-end cards. Using midi is probably a good idea (and you are welcome to use dosmid for midi loading) but I think you should rely on FM synth (0x388 IIRC) for playback, or provide a configurable setting to the user: MPU/FM. Of course FM quality is poor, but should be acceptable for a game tune (and better than no music at all for sure). Btw, any chance to find the beta of your game somewhere on the net already? Mateusz On August 12, 2014 10:16:15 PM GMT+02:00, Jaroslav Beran jaroslav.be...@gmail.com mailto:jaroslav.be...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am working on some small game and one of points in my todo list is to enable play background music. One possibility is to grab similar project. But better way would be to use shared library if it is possible. So my question is do you plan provide also shared library? :-) Jarda 2014-08-10 13:16 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr mailto:mate...@viste.fr: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:45 PM, Jaroslav Beran jaroslav.be...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Mateusz, Back to the original question. If I understand well you dont plan to publish api as library. In my opinion it is quite pity because there is potential for reusing it in other projects. DOS doesn't *have* libraries in the Windows or Linux sense. The only way to do approximately what you want is what Mateusz appears to have done: write modular source code, so developers can pick the parts that are useful to them and add them to the code for their program when they build it. Jarda __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
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
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hello, I am working on some small game and one of points in my todo list is to enable play background music. One possibility is to grab similar project. But better way would be to use shared library if it is possible. So my question is do you plan provide also shared library? :-) Jarda 2014-08-10 13:16 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its stable, and plays all my MIDI files right. It doesn't come with many features yet, though. I tested it only on my SoundBlaster 64 AWE card, as well as with my MIDI piano keyboard, and it worked well with both. Unfortunately I don't have any other MIDI hardware, but there's no reason I am aware of that would make it non-functional with other hardware, as long as MPU-401 compatibility is there. enjoy! Mateusz -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hi Jarda Actually, there is no such thing like a shared library in DOS. Nonetheless, you can of course reuse DOSMid code (BSD, no strings attached). I wrote it so code reusal shall be easy - if you look into it, there are specialized modules for everything. The midi.c module would be the closest thing to a MIDI library. Simply snap it into your project and include its header file. You should also find usage explanations in the header. Let me know if anything is unclear, I will gladly help integrating DOSMid into your project (and improve its documentation if such need arise). Note however, that you should probably not rely on MPU for music. Most el cheapo soundcards don't have a wavetable onboard, its something found only in high-end cards. Using midi is probably a good idea (and you are welcome to use dosmid for midi loading) but I think you should rely on FM synth (0x388 IIRC) for playback, or provide a configurable setting to the user: MPU/FM. Of course FM quality is poor, but should be acceptable for a game tune (and better than no music at all for sure). Btw, any chance to find the beta of your game somewhere on the net already? Mateusz On August 12, 2014 10:16:15 PM GMT+02:00, Jaroslav Beran jaroslav.be...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am working on some small game and one of points in my todo list is to enable play background music. One possibility is to grab similar project. But better way would be to use shared library if it is possible. So my question is do you plan provide also shared library? :-) Jarda 2014-08-10 13:16 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its stable, and plays all my MIDI files right. It doesn't come with many features yet, though. I tested it only on my SoundBlaster 64 AWE card, as well as with my MIDI piano keyboard, and it worked well with both. Unfortunately I don't have any other MIDI hardware, but there's no reason I am aware of that would make it non-functional with other hardware, as long as MPU-401 compatibility is there. enjoy! Mateusz -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hi Mateusz, I saw some possibility of creating dll in case of watcom but didnt sure if it is usable under dos. I understand well that BSD license allowes me to do many thinks with you code. But idea is to provide api as shared or static library and keep it under maintenance. In the past I read here about idea to do the same with tcp stack. Ok, this activity will not affect legacy software, but it would be nice to have library collection for new or active projects. In such case all we can yield all synergies from shared code (shared knowledge, maintenance, and so on) I dont know if my game (another tetris) will really make happy somebody but you can find it here:-) https://bitbucket.org/berk76/tetris Original aim was to play with TC 2.01 and FreeDos and test their possibilities. Now I would like to add some additional improvements like playing background sound and so on. Jarda 2014-08-12 22:54 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr: Hi Jarda Actually, there is no such thing like a shared library in DOS. Nonetheless, you can of course reuse DOSMid code (BSD, no strings attached). I wrote it so code reusal shall be easy - if you look into it, there are specialized modules for everything. The midi.c module would be the closest thing to a MIDI library. Simply snap it into your project and include its header file. You should also find usage explanations in the header. Let me know if anything is unclear, I will gladly help integrating DOSMid into your project (and improve its documentation if such need arise). Note however, that you should probably not rely on MPU for music. Most el cheapo soundcards don't have a wavetable onboard, its something found only in high-end cards. Using midi is probably a good idea (and you are welcome to use dosmid for midi loading) but I think you should rely on FM synth (0x388 IIRC) for playback, or provide a configurable setting to the user: MPU/FM. Of course FM quality is poor, but should be acceptable for a game tune (and better than no music at all for sure). Btw, any chance to find the beta of your game somewhere on the net already? Mateusz On August 12, 2014 10:16:15 PM GMT+02:00, Jaroslav Beran jaroslav.be...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, I am working on some small game and one of points in my todo list is to enable play background music. One possibility is to grab similar project. But better way would be to use shared library if it is possible. So my question is do you plan provide also shared library? :-) Jarda 2014-08-10 13:16 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its stable, and plays all my MIDI files right. It doesn't come with many features yet, though. I tested it only on my SoundBlaster 64 AWE card, as well as with my MIDI piano keyboard, and it worked well with both. Unfortunately I don't have any other MIDI hardware, but there's no reason I am aware of that would make it non-functional with other hardware, as long as MPU-401 compatibility is there. enjoy! Mateusz -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] DOSMid - plays MIDI files on DOS via a MPU-401 interface
Hi, On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 6:16 AM, Mateusz Viste mate...@viste.fr wrote: Hi DOSers, Today, I decided to release publicly my latest project: DOSMid. http://dosmid.sourceforge.net DOSMid is a MIDI player for (free)DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays both MIDI and RMID files. It's released under a BSD license. DOSMid is not a software MIDI emulator, thus it requires a MIDI-capable hardware available via the standard MPU-401 interface. Many sound cards provide such interface, although some need an additional 'wavetable' chip to produce actual MIDI sound, or a special TSR (like AWEUTIL, for SB32/SB64 cards). 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). DOSMid is still in a beta phase (v0.5), but its stable, and plays all my MIDI files right. It doesn't come with many features yet, though. I tested it only on my SoundBlaster 64 AWE card, as well as with my MIDI piano keyboard, and it worked well with both. Unfortunately I don't have any other MIDI hardware, but there's no reason I am aware of that would make it non-functional with other hardware, as long as MPU-401 compatibility is there. enjoy! The real question (although arguably not what DOS386 wants to hear) is what modern emulators it works under. I assume DOSBox is okay. I wonder about VirtualBox or QEMU. I'll have to test it there later. In case you haven't tired of me saying it (over and over again), I'm pretty much a noob at a lot of this stuff. My interest is very very very casual. BUT ... having said that, I did (barely) dabble in trying some MIDI players for DOS back in the day (several years ago). Just for comparison, there are a few others: http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=9134#p9137 Some of those have sources, but some don't. I don't even remember where I got half of them. Scene.org? Sac.SK? Obviously the simple PC speaker one was from FreeDOS. And Allegro's PLAY (DJGPP, but only Allegro v3 because v4 was broken??), that I even put on my RUFFIDEA disk #3, IIRC. I think I put a small .MID of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (that I also found on some random place) as test. Paul Toth had some website with lots of obscurely weird but interesting (Turbo) Pascal stuff. It was small and neat but somewhat buggy, but I think?? it had sources. ftp://ftp.sac.sk/pub/sac/sound/mp102.zip http://www.zoo-logique.org/tothpaul/zip/MIDI.ZIP Oh yeah, RealMIDI and OpenCubicPlayer are already in FreeDOS SOUND. But again, dunno the details, and some of these are buggy. 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). P.S. I just double-checked, and SoftMPU was updated two months ago (not that I know how to test it!). So I updated the iBiblio mirror of that (even though it doesn't currently work with JEMM386 and needs old MS C and MASM to rebuild, sigh): http://bjt42.github.io/softmpu/ -- ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
