DoomMaster's whereabouts

[Wain]

Did you know that you can also hook up a MIDI keyboard to a PCs sound card and most PC games will play the music through it instead of the speakers? It sounds really awesome! The normal sound SFX will still play through the speakers, but the music will be played on the MIDI keyboard. Here's what you do:

I feel I must point out here that while it is true that you can do this (being a musician, I do do this), VERY FEW modern PC games use midi files for their music.  You will mainly see it in Japanese adventure games (Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and most Hentai CD-ROM games) and that's about it unless you look in the public domain gaming world.  However if you have a good quality keyboard I can't recommend doing this enough because when the benefit is there, it is much better.

[Wain]

jeffimix wrote:
I think you can play FF7's music like that... too bad it don't work on WinXP (*looks saddened*)

There's a patch available to run Final Fantasy VII on XP, and it also enables 4x(I think) antialiasing.  It doesn't always work though.  FF 7 is one of the most hardware dependent games released over the past 7 years, there's a LOT of video card and operating system configurations it doesn't like.  Also gotta try win98 compatibilty mode, it works for some people.

[Wain]

General MIDI sucks  Yamaha's XG level 2 MIDI totally "blows the doors off it", but is totally backwards compatible with it at the same time.

errrr...ummm....k.

you do realize that Yamaha's XG is an EXTENSION to GM Midi, and not a replacement or alternative right?

In the end it's just important to remember that being XG or even GM compatible has nothing to do with how good your playback sounds, just whether or not a given MIDI sequence can be played back correctly(which of course could indirectly affect how good something sounds).

[Wain]

I have heard no soundcard that has the quite the clarity of a good quality tonegenerator when it comes to MIDI playback.

/me likes my rackmount.

Apex Pro from AVM Technologies was a Kurzweil synth in soundcard form for ~$200 in 1997...OUTSTANDING MIDI playback, also had a complete instrument editor.

Guillemot also released several high quality sound cards for amateur audiophiles/musicians with high quality MIDI playback also in the same price range, usually with Yamaha chipsets.

Of course Soundblaster is crap, and all of the general gamer sound cards don't have any decent sound generation either, but these cards weren't designed with that in mind, they're more interested in getting higher sample/playback rates with higher s/n ratio.




/me likes my K2600  :-P