MIDI recording

[robertmo]

I want to inform you that the next dosboxcvs has got a feature for recording .mid files when you press Ctrl-Alt-F8

[Ari]

how does it do it? I suppose it's a "real-time" recording option, right?

[Alistair]

Sounds dodgy. I can see it now; someone having 6 programs open in XP and 'recording' a MIDI that plays at the wrong speed and clips constantly. Wooo.

- Alistair

[Fancia]

Sounds dodgy. I can see it now; someone having 6 programs open in XP and 'recording' a MIDI that plays at the wrong speed and clips constantly. Wooo.

- Alistair

Presumeably the MIDI is timed to the emulated computer, not the computer that's emulating it.

[robertmo]

why don't you just check it

[Alkarion]

In my experience clipping or wrong speeds are no issue with the MIDI capturing function of Dosbox. I think such problems would rather be surprising because Dosbox has complete control over the executed code and knows how fast the program wants to write to the MIDI port. (The same applies to .WAV and OPL recording. The real work went into the emulator, capturing program outputs then is IMHO a relatively easy task.)

IMHO this is the "cleanest" and most stable way to record MIDI data since the program assumes to run in native environment but there are absolutely no physical signal transfers and only data extractions from the program code.

[Tom]

In my experience clipping or wrong speeds are no issue with the MIDI capturing function of Dosbox. I think such problems would rather be surprising because Dosbox has complete control over the executed code and knows how fast the program wants to write to the MIDI port.

How could speed changes ever be an issue, since the speed of MIDI is controlled by embedded meta data in the form of tempo?  Beats per measure and tempo are part of MIDI  data being transferred from one MIDI source to another.  Unless for some reason, the receiving MIDI hardware/software ignores some or the MIDI or meta data.  Then I would assume, playback speed would be defaulted to 120 bpm.  Maybe I just misunderstood what was being said...

What is MIDI "clipping"?

[Alistair]

Right. Well, people use DOSBOX generally on XP, right? XP for some reason doesn't like DOS (go figure!) so won't play MIDI music normally at the right speed. However, DOSBOX could remedy this. I must check sometime. I hate being 'eternally busy'.

- Alistair

[Alkarion]

Well, people use DOSBOX generally on XP, right? XP for some reason doesn't like DOS (go figure!) so won't play MIDI music normally at the right speed. However, DOSBOX could remedy this.

Dosbox has nothing to do with XP's Dos emulation (in fact, it is platform independent) and is far superior to it. Apart from the emulation of all major DOS sound cards and intelligent MPU-401 Dosbox gives you complete control over the speed of program execution.

How could speed changes ever be an issue, since the speed of MIDI is controlled by embedded meta data in the form of tempo?

I must admit I know relatively little about MIDI data, but it is a common experience that MIDI playback is stopped or slowed down in Windows if the CPU is very busy. If the note off signal is not sent because the PC is busy, a note would be held longer than intended, I think.

[Zemus]

If the emulation goes slowly, the MIDI music will also go slower. I think that's what people are talking about. But your computer must be very slow to run DOSbox slowly

[Tom]

Ahh...I see.  Sort of like when I first played Heart Of China on an 8088 PC.  Had some problems with music and graphics playback because the program was very CPU extensive for that PC.

[Fancia]

If the emulation goes slowly, the MIDI music will also go slower. I think that's what people are talking about. But your computer must be very slow to run DOSbox slowly

Except that the logging probably doesn't log the MIDI as heard by you when emulating. :3 It would, I'd assume, time itself according to the emulated clock so that even if the emulation speed fluctuates, the MIDI remains stable.

[Alistair]

I thought a problem with DOSBOX was that it required quite fast PC's?

- Alistair

[HondaSiR]

I run DosBox on my P2-333 and I encounter no problems with it....I can now play Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (the very old version) without speed issues. MoSlo failed to slow down this game on my P2, whereas DosBox succeeded.

-Johnny

[Schloss Ritter]

Does it possibly run better on a Pentium 2 than on a similar speed AMD K6-2?  I remember trying it on a circa 1989 RPG (with PC speaker sound) and having it run way too slow no matter what I tried.

[seskanda]

why don't you just check it

Well, I just did, after testing the Adlib OPL2 grabbing feature, I went ahead to try this, but it is NOT working!!! I've tried two different games: Lord of the Rings: Volume One, and Jurassic Park, so I press Ctrl+alt+F8 to try LOTR first, and it says: "Capture Raw Midi to capture\lord_000.mid" I'm supposed to just leave it alone and let it capture/record for as long as I want, right? Once, it records the amount of music I desired, I hit Ctrl+alt+F8 again to stop it, and it states "stopping raw midi saving." That's just dandy, but when I open the file i see it is only 1KB with no MIDI data or anything!!

The almost exact same thing happened when I tried to rip the music from JP, except that somehow, although i'm not sure when or why, either during the ripping process or after it there were messages I didn't spot before like: "read mixer 22" or "write mixer 4 88" Yet, the .mid file still contains nothing, like last time, and it too is 1KB. Is there something else  I need to do in order to rip the music in .mid format? It looks as if this function is broken, corrupted, bugged, etc. in the latest CVS (7-20-04) and the previous CVS (7-13-04).

[robertmo]

Thank you for finding these two not working games. Should be fixed in the next version. If you find any other not working game in the next version don't hesitate to post

[seskanda]

Thank you for finding these two not working games. Should be fixed in the next version. If you find any other not working game in the next version don't hesitate to post

Per your request about reporting other broken games you can add the following games to the list, as well: Lord of the Rings: Volume Two, Wolfenstein 3D, and Bio-Menace. Yep, that should make it all the games that i wanna rip the music from, but too bad it isn't working. Seriously though, I really think this MIDI recording function is clearly inoperable, to say the least, and it's not only JP and LOTR that aren't working. :!:

[robertmo]

May I ask you how do you have midi music in Wolfenstein 3D? I only have sound blaster, adlib, disney sound source, pc speaker, no sound.

[Alistair]

Wolf3D has General MIDI, doesn't it? One of the few Apogee series that did.

- Alistair