PMDoom music?

[Trixster]

Hi, I’m running Patrice’s PMDoom on my CT60e. All works fine using the Ultimate Doom WAD file but I get no music.

Does anyone know how to enable game music? Any way to get it to work with my MT-32 as well?

Thanks.

[mikro]

AFAIK the only 'port' with music is Doug's BadMood. The biggest problem with all the games (Doom, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, ...) from that era is that they require significant resources to emulate SoundBlaster instruments and stuff. Yes, the DSP is an ideal candidate for such job but it requires some dedication. There's even a library for that (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/TiMidity) but it's very CPU hungry for our humble 060s.

I guess to get it working via MIDI would be far easier. There's a project with a very similar (same?) goal, Saulot's amidilib: https://n0kturnal.github.io/amidilib/ so who knows?

[jury]

Also maybe this will be released some day:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=30912&p=308184&hilit=dsp#p308184

[Patrice Mandin]

I once thought about using some kind of midi to ym conversion, i.e. downmixing the 16 channels midi to 3 channels ym (drum + instrument 1 + instrument 2) by picking the most important parts of the midi music. I don't know ym enough to make even a simple test or experimentation.

[Eero Tamminen]

Doug's music code in BadMood is pretty nice. There's support both for playing the music through MIDI, and Doug's CPU-side soft synthesizer that AFAIK takes only few percent of CPU.

[mikro]

Doug's music code in BadMood is pretty nice. There's support both for playing the music through MIDI, and Doug's CPU-side soft synthesizer that AFAIK takes only few percent of CPU.

Yeah but wasn't the music specially preprocessed and/or tweaked for his player? I mean it's not a universal player where you just incbin your favourite mid file and play it, is it.

[PeterS]

Several years ago I had PM Doom running on the Milan but I don't think I ever got the sounds working.

[Eero Tamminen]

Yeah but wasn't the music specially preprocessed and/or tweaked for his player? I mean it's not a universal player where you just incbin your favourite mid file and play it, is it.

I think the player eats fairly straightforward MIDI-data, and that some early version of the MIDI player required just converting the data from multi-channel to single channel.

If I remember correctly, most of the effort spent by Doug went into tweaking the softsynth instrument sounds to match well to the songs themselves. That's normally a problem with non-Atari softsynths too, when song has been written for some specific device / soundfont.

[mzry]

It would be nice if Doug can share his music work with Patrice as PMDoom is the best option for ct60 Falcons and TTs.