[Scummvm-devel] Linux music progress report (with Timidity)

[Tom Dunstan]

J.Brown (Ender/Amigo) wrote:


> The synchro is perfect in Windows - the problem isn't your code as such,
> it's that Timidity is not responsive enough. Or maybe it's just a
> sideeffect of the fact the sound patches are not exactly the same,
> which stretch the midi out. When I quit scummvm, Timidity
> keeps playing backlogged midi music.


On my box (Redhat 7.2) timidity was compiled to use ESD by default, and 
it ran really, REALLY slow. 4 or 5 times too slow. I've got it talking 
directly to the sound card now (run with -Od), and it's just a bit slow, 
maybe at 50 or 60 percent or full speed, similar to your experiences. Eg 
in the intro the surfy music played when Hoagie's Chron-O-John crashes 
is actually played as Bernard emerges from his, covered in water.

> However, most people do not have a
> wave-table aware card under Linux. I can't get my SBLives wavetable to
> work, although the driver supports it, it doesn't work with the Linux
> driver on my particually motherboard.


The OSS drivers for my sound card don't support midi. The alsa ones do, 
so I might have to look at getting alsa running again here. It's a bit 
ironic: I had Mandrake installed up until about a week ago, which had 
the alsa patches. Oh well. I'm stuck with timidity for the time being. :)

Great work so far everyone!

> And unfortuantly there are not really any better software players than
> Timidity.


I certainly haven't heard of any.

>>And integrating Timidity in the ScummVM code in NOT a good idea... Timidity
>>is rather big and I do not like these 'let's copy the code instead of
>>working out an interface' ways of coding...
>>
> 
> I agree entirely.

Yeah. I wonder why the SDL_mixer guys used a copy of the timidity code 
internally. Maybe timidity wasn't installed on most machines by default 
at that time. Or maybe they anted to do some stuff that the timidity 
interface didn't allow? Seems unlikely: the SDL_mixer interface is 
really basic.

Tom