![final doom roland sound canvas final doom roland sound canvas](https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/48/47190/doom-200826-120951.png)
On a regular PC, the read would have happened in the background, and the music would continue playing. Because the PCjr does not have a DMA controller, it actually pauses the music for a bit. If you listen closely, you can hear the floppy drive reading the next bit of data. I fine-tuned my assembly-optimized player routines, so they could run on my 128k IBM PCjr:Įven that works fine! It actually streams the data from floppy, because the MIDI file was too large to fit in memory. So I decided to see if I could go even more low-end. All the complex timing is precalculated into a simple stream of delay values, adjusted for the PIT resolution, and blobs of MIDI data to send directly to the interface. So I decided to add support for the DreamBlaster S2P to my MIDI player, and tried it on an 8088: So even on an 8088 at 4.77 MHz, these devices are a very realistic target, when used natively.
![final doom roland sound canvas final doom roland sound canvas](https://media.moddb.com/images/downloads/1/200/199660/doom2-200826-115339.png)
The parallel port protocol is very simple, and takes barely more CPU time than a regular ISA device. You will not need SoftMPU, and you will not require a 386. If you write new software, and you already want to support MIDI/OPL2/OP元 music, it is trivial to add native support for these devices. The same goes for the OPL2LPT and OP元LPT. However, I think the most interesting application of this device would be with newly written games, demos and other software. It currently works with DOOM and other games using the same sound engine (Heretic, Hexen, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, etc.), and with games that use the Miles Audio Interface Library, both 16-bit and 32-bit. It can also work with protected mode games, which SoftMPU does not currently support. This means you will not need SoftMPU, so you also will not need a 386 or higher if the game does not require it.
#Final doom roland sound canvas Patch#
The second video is with my modified SoftMPU, running the actual game in MT-32 mode:Īlso, like with the OPL2LPT, it is possible to patch native support into games. In MT-32 mode, the instruments sound much more like how the composer intended. What you can hear is how the instruments sound very wrong in General MIDI mode. Pay no attention to the haphazard timing, it was still an early version of the MIDI playback routine. First you hear it in General MIDI mode, then you hear it in MT-32 mode: The first video is an early test, where I use my own MIDI player with a captured MIDI file from Monkey Island (a game with MT-32 music, not General MIDI). Here are two early videos I made, to demonstrate. The SAM2695 also has an MT-32-compatible mode, and I added a patch to support it in SoftMPU. This is a very early video made by Serdaco when the device was working with SoftMPU for the first time: So what can you do with it? Well, the most obvious use case for now, is to use SoftMPU to play games with General MIDI support over an MPU-401 interface. A reset button was added to the design as well. In the final version that is now available, the problem with the patch wire is fixed in the design. Based on his working code, I could get mine to work as well.
![final doom roland sound canvas final doom roland sound canvas](https://sc55.duke4.net/images/newlogo.png)
Pdewacht got it to work eventually, and he modified SoftMPU to support the DreamBlaster S2P. As it turned out, a patch wire was required. I tried a few things to see if I could get it working, but sadly it didn’t work. When I got it, it was still in the early stages of development, and nobody managed to get it to work properly yet. It uses a similar approach to the OPL2LPT and OP元LPT. The DreamBlaster S2P makes use of the special parallel interface, which allows you to send MIDI data one byte at a time over a parallel bus, such as an ISA bus, or in this case a printer port.
#Final doom roland sound canvas serial#
The regular DreamBlaster S2 uses the standard serial MIDI interface.
![final doom roland sound canvas final doom roland sound canvas](https://analogrelics.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/sc-55-1.jpg)
It uses a Dream SAM2695 synthesizer chip. The DreamBlaster S2P is based on the DreamBlaster S2 WaveBlaster module. I received mine over a year ago, and it actually was an early prototype. I want to talk about the DreamBlaster S2P from Serdaco. In the interest of catching up, here is the second blog that is long overdue.