Dont Stop the Music

[evildragon]

I think I over did it. LOL I wanted my Model 25 to play this song, cause the song has a lot of sounds the OPL3 could pull off.

It should be playing this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk8NQB_T1ws

But instead played it like this on it's FM OPL3...
http://www.mediafire.com/?itzdfftmdjd

Stumbling over the notes. That's with an 8087 and NEC V30.

[carlsson]

Cute! The beginning was promising. What makes it slow down so terribly after 1.30? Are all notes fetched with far calls or something?

By the way, can you spell D-I-S-T-O-R-T-I-O-N?

[evildragon]

I accidentally had the IBM connected to the mixer with Speaker out, and not the Line Out like I should have used. So it amped the output.

I think it got slow because the MIDI file was too "fast" for the processor to keep up. But it always seemed to be related to the certain "sound" it played.

[Trixter]

I think I over did it. LOL I wanted my Model 25 to play this song, cause the song has a lot of sounds the OPL3 could pull off.

It should be playing this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk8NQB_T1ws

But instead played it like this on it's FM OPL3...
http://www.mediafire.com/?itzdfftmdjd

Stumbling over the notes. That's with an 8087 and NEC V30.

Two things are going on: The MIDI file probably has a crazy high timebase, and your MIDI player is not very optimized. Post links to both the MIDI and the player and I can probably suggest something that plays it better (or confirm that the MIDI timebase is way way too high, like 1200bpm). If you have a MIDI sequencer, you can try loading the MIDI and re-quantizing down to something reasonable like 120bpm, then saving it and seeing how that works.

Modern MIDI files aren't very "nice" in regards to the spec because modern hardware has no problem playing out of spec files.

[evildragon]

I was able to get this from the MIDI: 1544.00 bits/s

Anyway, I use SBMIDI and PlayMIDI from creative labs, the only ones that ever seemed to work.

Here's the MIDI file location: http://www.mididelight.com/free-dont-stop-the-music-ringtone/download/2558

[carlsson]

Cool. The MIDI file even has a lyrics track built-in. A total of 11 channels.

[Trixter]

I was able to get this from the MIDI: 1544.00 bits/s

Anyway, I use SBMIDI and PlayMIDI from creative labs, the only ones that ever seemed to work.

Here's the MIDI file location: http://www.mididelight.com/free-dont-stop-the-music-ringtone/download/2558

The timediv in that midi file is 480, which is way too high for such a simple song, which explains why your setup is having trouble playing it. If you load it into a sequencer and requantize it to something a bit more reasonable (like 96) it will play without a problem.

I can't run sbmidi on my 8088 for some reason. I disassembled it looking for any 286 instructions but couldn't find any; oh well for me.

If you want some really good MIDI files, grab ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/xtfiles.rar and poke around in apputils\sound\midi\songs. However they were picked as a good example of GS GMIDI so they won't sound as good on FM.

If you want the very best examples of what FM can do, download Adlib Visual Composer and also Edlib and listen to the example songs (*especially* edlib).

[evildragon]

The only SBMIDI I could ever get to load was I believe one for the SB Pro 1/2 MCV or something like that. I can send you what I used, it works on the 8086...

Though I don't think it works on OPL2, sounds corrupted, only works on OPL3 (or a SB Pro with dual OPL2's)..

I'll give those MIDI's a try, and that utility..

For my main computer, OS X Leopard running system, I have no sequencer to even use or try.