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

[Jordi Vilalta Prat]

2010/9/15 Max Horn:
> 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.

IIRC the API for this is already there, it's just a matter of
improving the drivers so they return the actual list of available
devices. For example, at least the Windows MIDI, ALSA and CAMD drivers
already return the list of available devices.

IMHO the mt32emu driver should be changed so it just lists the
emulated MT-32 device when the ROMs are available. That way it
wouldn't be instantiated even if the engine specifies PREFER_MT32 and
it would fallback to GM, AdLib or anything else.

The same applies to other music types like GM. For example, in a small
backend, if no driver returns any MIDI/MT-32, it would fall back
directly to AdLib.

> 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.

Of course that would be much better, but the previous would be much
faster to implement.