During the week I learned that SCUMMVM (which allows you to play a large selection of adventure games) has options for routing the music to a device of your choice, while still playing speech and sound effects through the computer. (I'm guessing there was a small window in time when games stored their music as MIDI and also had sampled effects and speech.)


There are some things that I want to add.

This of course relies on the audio being available as MIDI within the game. I found other games that didn't work this way.

When it worked, it worked surprisingly well and is fun. But like playing .mid files into MIDISID, it's not perfect. Because of the limitations and the way that it maps the channels, sometimes parts of the music are lost.  (This is part of the reason why I edited the DOTT intro.)

This applies to playing .mid files too, although with .mid files you have the option of editing the files a little to get more from them. It's easy to find the .mid files for the music from these games but you wouldn't be able to use your edited music in-game. 

I do plan to improve the '6-channel' problem by adding an option to General MIDI mode which would listen for all notes on all channels and just use the next available voice (up to the 6 available). I've already written this system into my software for real C64 with MIDI cart. See this video of canyon.mid rendered by a dual-SID 64.  However, there are some trade-offs. You can't predict which voice will be used for a note and therefore the 'stereo' goes to pot. notes appear randomly on each side and you really have to mix down to mono. If there are many channels used and the music is busy, then you'll still get a lot of missing notes, but rather than whole channels being missing, what notes you hear or miss becomes a little more unpredictable.

I am also planning the MIDISID 'beast' which will have 6 SIDs and 18 voices, to cover all channels. This still won't manage multiple notes per channel (ie chords) but the arpeggiation (which I didn't use in today's video) can sound very good and 'SID-like'.

Thanks for your interest.



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