[Scummvm-devel] mt-32 emu by default?

[Max Horn]

Am 15.09.2010 um 15:16 schrieb yotam barnoy:

> I agree, and I think I think I have some of these problems on the PSP
> too, with the wrong sound device being selected automatically.
> 
> I think that we should have some other mechanism for recommending the
> best sound choice for the game. Perhaps the launcher should have a
> field called 'Recommended Device:' in the per-game sound tab, just to
> give a hint to the user.

Actually, going beyond that, I think we should consider the following (but as Johannes already said, of course after branching 1.2.0):

First off, each engine should be able to specify (potentially for every game separately) a preference order on supported music formats. 

On the other hand, the launcher resp. the backend should also be enabled (somehow, not yet clear to me how) to affect this. E.g. by default, we would always move down MT-32 below other drivers / formats. 

The idea here is that one the one hand, an engine should be allowed to correctly reflect which sound options are "best", w/o having to worry whether the user will be able to make use of that; OTOH, the backend / launcher should be able to adjust this to reality. In the future, this then could also be improved to take into account availability of certain music devices or even drivers: By adding a MusicDriver API which allows querying whether a given device is available. The MT-32 emu then would simply return "false" if it can't find the required ROMs. Or the seq driver would return false if no MIDI device was set up. Etc.

Lastly, we *could* allow the user to also affect this ordering (by default, on the global level; it should be necessary on a per-game or per-engine level) to tweak this. e.g. if users happen to have an MT-32 attached which is reachable via /dev/seq, then they should be able to move "MT-32 via this particular /dev/seq device" to the top.

Anyway, our Music driver design got a bit better already (and a bit worse, due to hopefully fixable regression), yet we still have a lot of ground to cover until it is really *good* not to mention great... :)


Bye,
Max