[TAG] playmidi plays silently

[sindi keesan]

On Sat, 4 Jun 2005, sindi keesan wrote:
>
> I have done some more experimenting on the ISA AWE cards.
> I have a Vibra16 CT3930 which has jumpers (not pnp) and it is the only one 
> that initializes AWE32 in DOS and plays AWE in DOS.  I have two CT3600s one 
> of which is AWE32 and has 512K free RAM and the other SB32 without the free 
> RAM, but all three cards have two SIMM slots (with 2x4MB) - one had a jumper 
> to enable this RAM, the others did not.
>
> The CT3600s and two AWE642 (4520) play awe in a DOS box under Win98, which 
> means Windows is initializing the awe part.  They play all but AWE in plain 
> DOS.  I have not yet tried the Vibra16 in linux with playmidi.
>
> None of these cards needed sound banks loaded in DOS or Windows (unless 
> Windows loads its own automatically) so I don't think that is my problem, I 
> think it is initialization.


The non-pnp Vibra16 CT3930 sound card, which should not need pnp 
initialization, plays AWE in DOS but not in linux.  It has 1MB GM (general 
midi) sound onboard so should not need sound loaded.  It also plays 
silently with playmidi in linux. 
I made character device sequencer.

insmod sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5
insmod awe_wave

One person also put mpu_io=0x620 on the sb line.

I suspect my problem is that I compiled playmidi wrong.  Someone with a 
plain SB16 card said that FM synthesis is broken.  I remarked out a bunch 
of lines and parts of lines referring to things I did not want, so I 
would not have to install GTK and other libraries related to producing 
a fancy graphical output rather than just sound, and probably also broke 
the AWE part.  There is a precompiled playmidi that worked for other 
people but not for me which I can also try to get working.

At the same site as the awesfx utilities for loading sound banks 
(awesfx-0.5.0d.tar.gz source - 94K)), I found an alternative midi player 
in the package awemidi-0.4.3c.tgz (366K) which I will attempt to compile 
(hopefully it can be configured NOT to need the GTK-based interface or 
someone here can suggest how to modify Makefile properly to avoid it). 
The player is 'drvmidi'.

The author suggests that if you have a pnp card you can initialize it in 
DOS and then use loadlin.  I have four pnp AWE cards.  I downloaded some 
more AWE32 drivers, which are available at a Finnish site - 130-AWE1.ZIP 
through 4.ZIP, and also awe_REV4.zip (all from 1995) and some more faq and 
info files, and will try to get these cards playing AWE in DOS.  I also 
found sbldos.zip - DOS sblive drivers, for my two PCI (non-pnp) cards with 
a similar EMU80?? awe chip.

There is also an sb64basic.exe (the site was not working when I tried) 
and, likewise inaccessible yesterday, 700031A.exe through E.exe for AWE32 
(hopefully for DOS not just Windows), A being drivers and C utilities.

You cannot initialize these cards in Win98 and then reboot to DOS and keep 
them initialized - I tried that too.