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MIDI issues with Inspiron 7000 laptop running Win98se

computerdude92

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I have the ESS Maestro 2e in my Inspiron 7000. Problem is, I can't find a newer driver for it than version 2.78 - which came out in 1998. It appears to be a VXD driver. I wish I could find a working WDM driver for this Inspiron 7000 so I can use Microsoft GS Wavetable MIDI for my games. I read it does not work with VXD audio drivers.

I installed King's Quest VII and all I get is the piano instrument and barely anything else. The game sounds like an old school theater play with a grand piano, instead of the synth style music I wanted. I do slightly hear drums at times, and the music sounded briefly a little bit more normal when I go in between the game menu options.

I love this game's soundtrack so much, I can't play it unless the MIDI is working properly. I tried updating the KQ7 version 1.4 game with the 1.51 patch and that did nothing. I also went to device manager for my sound driver, and there is an option to select 2mb or 4mb for the audio. I tried 4mb, and now the piano music sounds more detailed, but that's it. No other changes.

Oddly, my newer games like Age of Empires ROR and 3D Dinosaur Adventure have no issues playing their MIDI music on this laptop. I guess it's because KQ7 is such an old game that it's not forward compatible with newer MIDI chipsets.

Any helpful hints and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Which version of KQ7 are you running? That VXD/WDM difference should only apply to DOS games using MPU-401, but KQ7 had a Windows version as well and that should use whatever MIDI playback device has been set in Windows.

Did you actually change the MIDI playback device? It sounds like you only messed with the options of the sound driver itself.

Besides, I had no trouble finding WDM drivers:
 
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Oddly, my newer games like Age of Empires ROR and 3D Dinosaur Adventure have no issues playing their MIDI music on this laptop. I guess it's because KQ7 is such an old game that it's not forward compatible with newer MIDI chipsets.

Sound cards of the time provided MIDI through MPU-401 emulation, and the implementation of the emulation differed wildly between sound card vendors, and even different sound card models from the same vendor. This meant that MIDI scores composed on professional audio gear, like the Roland SC-55 that was popular at the time, sounded drastically different on PC sound cards that emulated MIDI.

ESS had some of the worst MPU-401 emulation out of sound cards back then, and MIDI scores sounded terrible on ESS cards. At best, it could do AdLib just barely.

Microsoft's GS Wavetable Synth sounded marginally better in Windows, but it was still far and away from using a real Roland SC-55.
 
As I was saying, the version of KQ7 I'm playing is 1.4. I updated it with the 1.51 patch, but it did not fix my MIDI issue.

There is no other MIDI playback device to choose from, other than the default. Although you can choose to allow 4mb instead of 2mb for the MIDI.

Very basic in features; There is no special software that comes with the driver either.
 
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The 2mb vs 4mb thing is the size of the sound font. Larger sound fonts had more MIDI instruments available with larger samples, which made MIDI playback sound a lot better.
 
I wonder why changing the sound font size did not help me. It still favors the bland sounding piano MIDI instrument almost all the time.
 
The larger sound font could have used the same piano sample, and just added more different instrument samples. How the sound font is laid out is entirely up to whoever made it.
 
Thanks! Though I notice PCMCIA sound cards are going for silly high prices on Ebay. It's so wrong. Regardless I am one step closer in the right direction.

Wasn't there also sound cards made that plugged into a parallel or serial port? I'm hoping I can find a cheap sound card that works. I was thinking something priced for under $100.
 
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Sort of.

There was the Covox Speech Thing, which was a really crude DAC using a resistor ladder plugged into the parallel port. A further iteration of it was the Disney Sound Source, which had a much more precise resistors and a built in amplifier in an external housing with a speaker. Both of these devices could only play PCM sound, not MIDI. They also required the software to support them for them to work. Quite a few games supported the Disney Sound Source, much less the earlier Covox Speech Thing. There are schematics available to build both of these devices.

Here's a video showing the Disney Sound Source:

There's also the OPL2LPT and OPL3LPT, which is a Yamaha YM3812/YM-262. The YM3812 was used on the original Adlib, and gives you Adlib sound, but not Adlib compatibility. The original Adlib card sat on port 388h, while the OPLxLPT is on the parallel port, usually at 378h. This requires a TSR and a 386 CPU to intercept calls to the original port and redirect them to the parallel port. This unfortunately also means that protected mode applications can't use this method. There is a patcher available that can patch the executable of some games to look for the altered port for it to work.


The obvious problem with both of these solutions is they don't give you both FM and PCM synthesis, just one or the other, so you'll have to pick what you want. Theoretically with some black magic and two parallel ports, you could run both devices at the same time and have the best of both worlds. The black magic would be altering the TSRs and games to use the different parallel port addresses for the different sound devices. one would be at 378h and the other at 3BCh or 278h.
 
Games in the Windows 3.x era still used MIDI, but by the time Windows 95 and especially 98 came around, games had moved on to PCM audio, or redbook audio on CDs for game sound tracks. Some games used tracker music, like Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The reason for MIDI and tracker music was because of storage space limitations. Raw PCM audio required a huge amount of disk space, and MPEG Layer 3 compression didn't exist yet. Even when it did exist, computers at the time were barely fast enough to decompress the sound data and do other things at the same time, hence why MPEG decoder cards were a thing for awhile.

One other option I forgot about is the Windows PC Speaker driver for Windows 3.x. It also worked in Windows 95 and I believe 98 as well. It was a VxD that basically used the CPU to bit bang the program interval timer and give a crude DAC to play PCM samples over the PC Speaker. The drawback of it was that the computer locked up while sound samples were playing since the CPU was 100% busy bit banging sound data. There was an option to allow system interrupts while sound data played, but that introduces hitching and choppy sound output.

I remember using it back on my 486 in the 90s when I was too poor to afford a sound card. It was better than having no sound at all, even though it could only do PCM audio and not MIDI.


Linux actually has a PC Speaker kernel module driver as well, and it works much better than the Windows driver.
 
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