pouët.net

Sound in small DOS intros ?

category: code [glöplog]
Even as a coder heavily "abusing" MIDI in my own sizetros, i'm with yzi here. The first fascination of the endless possibilities of MIDI quickly faded away when realizing that it has nothing to do with DOS at all. It's like we're talking DosBox / WinXP. It somewhat feels like the ZX80 - FPGA drama ;)

I also can follow the argumentation of "acceptance", that a platform defines by what people do with it, and MIDI usage never has been explicitly rejected or forbidden. Also, the major "playback" versions DosBox and WinXP are now widely accepted as DOS platform ( even slightly contrary to my own purity beliefs )

But we are where we are, so why not make the best of it. That is, imho, making people realize how freaking simple it is to either spit commands to the MIDI interface in a few bytes, or turn the speaker on and off and change the frequency. By now, i expect nothing less than a complete rocking chiptune with fluent 3D graphics in 256b. Everything less is not sufficient to be be called "awesome" ;)
added on the 2016-11-28 14:38:41 by HellMood HellMood
@Tigrou
Differences between an open and a closed platfrom.
Most OPL3 code will not work except on emulators for the real mode exception in x64, and bad on-chip implementation of previous physical SB cards. If you want to implement DMA module player on latest platform such as XP, you might want to look at my website :

28/08/2016 vdmsound
Relevant work by Vlad Romascanu with a fast sound emulator notably capable of emulating dma transfers nowadays forbidden in Virtual 8086 mode starting with XP+. This means it is easy to run a module player (as 1kbmod below) without any need from such as DOSBox or minifmod. After installationn, simply start a cmd, execute DOSDRV.EXE and then just type the name of the executable with module player. You may download it here.


The very interesting part is VDMsound engine will not slowdown your graphic code a tenth of how DOSBox slows down your graphic code when wanting to benefit from oldschool OPL3/SB availability.

Cheers
Quote:
latest platform such as XP

Latest? It's 15 years old! If you're going to use an outdated operating system for running DOS intros, why not use DOS?
added on the 2016-11-30 00:03:05 by absence absence
There will be also:
DREAMBLASTER X2 WAVEBLASTER
http://www.serdashop.com/DreamBlasterX2

So you will have GUS like soundcard on every soundcard with WAVEBLASTER port...
added on the 2016-12-01 06:55:21 by elan elan

login