SoundFonts in Windows 7 x64?

Firefairy · Post by **Firefairy** » Mon Nov 15, 2010 4:40 am

I have followed the steps listed in the Tutorial of using Timidity with Windows XP, and it almost works on my system, running Windows 7 x64.

The Good: Timidity runs great, I can play midis with soundfonts, and they are beautymous. I have a MidiYoke entry in my Control panel, which seems to work fine, and I have Vista MIDI Fix, which seems to be working.

The Bad: I can't get any of the MIDIYoke entries to show up in the lists in SCUMMVM or Vista MIDI Fix. I have the Japanese Timidity, which includes a driver itself, but it's 32-bit, so no dice.

I have been searching online, and seen several references to making this setup work on Win7x64, but they are all about two years old (which I think means they refer to the betas), or they don't go into detail about how to get this to work in Win 7, despite the differences in options and dialogs.

I would very much like to use soundfonts for my SCUMMVM games. I have gotten both Timidity and SynthFont to work for playing midis directly using soundfonts, and it appears either would be happy to play input, but I can't get my system to route MIDI to them, and SCUMMVM doesn't seem to know any of this even exists.

Help?

Versions:

Timidity++ 2.13.2
MIDI Yoke NT 1.75 Beta
SCUMMVM 1.2.0
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit

whatever · Post by **whatever** » Mon Nov 15, 2010 10:19 am

ScummVM has builtin soundfont-support via fluidsynth, I suggest you try it.

surdules · Post by **surdules** » Mon Nov 15, 2010 5:00 pm

FluidSynth/soundfonts work very well in ScummVM. You'll need a reasonably fast PC for it (> 1GhZ processor) -- no different from Timidity++ for that matter.

More information about that here and here.

Firefairy · Post by **Firefairy** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 4:42 am

I don't have FluidSynth as an option in the dropdown menus, and assigning a soundfont doesn't have any noticeable effect no matter which other option I choose. Am I missing something?

surdules · Post by **surdules** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 4:53 am

The soundfont will only work if you select FluidSynth as the audio driver.

Here are the steps I took to do this:

1). Launch ScummVM 1.2.0 (I'm using Windows XP)
2). Click "Options"
3). Go to the Audio tab, select "FluidSynth" for the "Music driver"
4). Go to the Midi tab, select the path to the sound font file.
5). All other audio driver settings, on any other page, are set to "<default>"

Razvan.

Firefairy · Post by **Firefairy** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 3:08 pm

That is very odd- I don't seem to have the same options and menus at all.

I have tabs for Graphics, Audio, Volume, MIDI, MT-32, Paths, and Misc.

My Audio tab has the following menus and options:

Preferred Device:
No Music
Microsoft G3 Wavetable Synth (Windows Midi)
MT-32 Emulator
AdLib Emulator
PC Speaker Emulator
IBM PCjr Emulator

AdLib Emulator:
MAME OPL Emulator
DOSBox OPL Emulator

Output Rate: (various kHz options)

Text And Speech
Radio buttons for Speech, Subtitles, or Both

Subtitle Speed (clickable bar, defaults to 60)

As you can see, no mention of FluidSynth. The only place SoundFonts are mentioned is in the MIDI tab, which also has an option for "GM Device". The only option in the dropdown menu is "Microsoft G3 Wavetable Synth [Windows MIDI]".

I just checked in the Linux version, and there, the top option in the Audio tab is labeled "Music Driver", and I am able to select FluidSynth just fine. Unfortunately, that's my laptop, and most of my games live on the desktop, which is the Win7 box.

surdules · Post by **surdules** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 4:52 pm

That's pretty weird. It sounds like FluidSynth is not enabled/supported on Windows 7 somehow.

Razvan.

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 5:52 pm

surdules wrote:That's pretty weird. It sounds like FluidSynth is not enabled/supported on Windows 7 somehow.

A difference between the 32- and 64-bit versions, perhaps? I don't have Windows, and no 64-bit CPU, but in the 32-bit EXE I found the string "Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib FluidSynth" while in the 64-bit EXE I could only find "Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib".

I can't be sure, but I assume that's the features string that you can see in the "About..." text under "Features compiled in:".

envisaged0ne · Post by **envisaged0ne** » Tue Nov 16, 2010 10:14 pm

Yeah, it's gotta be a 64bit version issue. I have 32 bit Win7 Ultimate and have the fluidsynth option. Used it and it works fine with a soundfont I downloaded.

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Wed Nov 17, 2010 12:41 am

eriktorbjorn wrote:
surdules wrote:That's pretty weird. It sounds like FluidSynth is not enabled/supported on Windows 7 somehow.
A difference between the 32- and 64-bit versions, perhaps? I don't have Windows, and no 64-bit CPU, but in the 32-bit EXE I found the string "Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib FluidSynth" while in the 64-bit EXE I could only find "Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib".

I can't be sure, but I assume that's the features string that you can see in the "About..." text under "Features compiled in:".

That's right the Win64 doesn't include FluidSynth, thus the sound font setting should be of no real use there.

Tobis87 · Post by **Tobis87** » Thu Nov 18, 2010 10:35 pm

LordHoto wrote:That's right the Win64 doesn't include FluidSynth, thus the sound font setting should be of no real use there.

Why is it not included?

I was able to cross-compile FluidSynth 1.0.8 for Win x64, but only as a shared dll.
And so far ScummVM seems to work well with it.

bobdevis · Post by **bobdevis** » Thu Nov 18, 2010 11:12 pm

Tobis87 wrote: Why is it not included?

The support for lots of other DOS-era stuff was dropped in the 64 bit versions starting with Vista.

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Thu Nov 18, 2010 11:23 pm

Tobis87 wrote:
LordHoto wrote:That's right the Win64 doesn't include FluidSynth, thus the sound font setting should be of no real use there.
Why is it not included?

Mostly because I don't have it built with MSVC, thus I didn't include it in the release.

Tobis87 · Post by **Tobis87** » Fri Nov 19, 2010 12:53 am

bobdevis wrote:The support for lots of other DOS-era stuff was dropped in the 64 bit versions starting with Vista.

Sorry, but this is not an issue with the library.

But if you're interested why they did:

Legacy Mode->
*286/386 Protected Mode
*V86 Mode
*Real Mode
Long mode->
*64-bit Mode
*Compatibility Mode

The CPU can switch in Long Mode from 64-Bit Mode into Compatibility Mode which supports 32 (386) and 16-bit (286) Protected Mode programs.

To use DOS programs you need the V86 Mode, which is missing in Compatibility Mode.
(The best option right now is to use Dosbox.)

To use Win 3.x programs you need a 16 to 64-bit thunking layer to convert memory addresses, which is missing in Windows.
(The best option in the future is to use Wine on a 64-bit Windows to run a 16-bit program.)

LordHoto wrote:Mostly because I don't have it built with MSVC, thus I didn't include it in the release.

ScummVM for Windows is build with MSVC?
I thought it was build with MinGW-w64, at least I did.

LordHoto · Post by **LordHoto** » Fri Nov 19, 2010 2:46 pm

Tobis87 wrote:
LordHoto wrote:Mostly because I don't have it built with MSVC, thus I didn't include it in the release.
ScummVM for Windows is build with MSVC?
I thought it was build with MinGW-w64, at least I did.

No the Win64 release version is built with MSVC.