Make EQ's music (MIDI) sound Significantly Better.

[mischief419]

2nd link broken.

[faBBe]

A WORD OF WARNING for Windows 10 users.

If you can't login anymore after playing around with this "BASSMIDI driver".

I was curious. Ran it once, selected the sound font. Didn't hear any music in game.

I became annoyed and figured I didn't want to spend time on this customization of the game for now, so I tried running the program again.

Only now, the "Configure BASSMIDI Driver" app would NOT start anymore. So I was unable to reset the midi driver. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I realised this was likely the cause that I couldn't run the game anymore because the file Logs/dbg.txt stopped at

Sound Manager loaded 2165 filenames from soundassets.txt.

... and there was no "WorldAuthenticate" to be seen.

I figured that since that's what I was messing with recently, it was probably the cause.

Even though I uninstalled BASSMIDI driver, it let an invalid driver in the REGISTRY!

So now you're having fun running REGEDIT and editing the registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth (only on 64bit systems)

Look for the "midi" keys and replace the "bassmididrv" entries with the default "wdmaud.drv".

Finally, the game logs into character screen. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

TLDR

- I used the BASSMIDI exe linked on Welgrim's page .. It ran once, but would not run again, therefore preventing me from resetting the MIDI device.
- Having uninstalled BASSMIDI ... the game now freezes on login as it can not find the now missing midi driver
- Had to manually clean the registry keys to get game to run again.

[faBBe]

My bad if you have the issue above the Registry keys modified by BASSMIDI driver are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32

Cf. Stackoverflow answer How to re enable the default MIDI synth in Windows 10?

[Knuckle]

So I updated my windows 10 to latest patch, it ruined virtualmidisynth so I rolled back the windows10 patch. Uninstalled and Reinstalled the program, am now only using your sound font. BUT I also extracted the updated music files you posted and I don't if that will screw something up please advice based on the screenshots below:

[Maestrobob]

Originally Posted by Knuckle [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So I updated my windows 10 to latest patch, it ruined virtualmidisynth so I rolled back the windows10 patch. Uninstalled and Reinstalled the program, am now only using your sound font. BUT I also extracted the updated music files you posted and I don't if that will screw something up please advice based on the screenshots below:

Dumping the mp3s into your EQ directory won't affect your install at all, so you'll be fine. Just know that if you're trying to get the EQ client to use them in game, it won't unless you change all of the zone emitter files (*.emt in the EQ dir) to point to the mp3 instead of the xmi. You can open any zone_emt file in your EQ dir with a text editor to see what I mean.

If you are using my soundfont to play back the in game MIDI music, it should work perfectly fine with VMS. Your soundfont chain is correct (synthusr-samplefix-BASSMIDI.sf2 only). If it's not working, then it's likely VMS is not set as the default MIDI mapper. Windows 10 has a terrible habit of changing default midi back to the MS synth on my box constantly, and if you recently rolled back it has probably reset the registry values for it. You'll have to use something like Coolsoft's MIDI mapper to change it back. -> https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/midimapper

[Knuckle]

Originally Posted by Maestrobob [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Dumping the mp3s into your EQ directory won't affect your install at all, so you'll be fine. Just know that if you're trying to get the EQ client to use them in game, it won't unless you change all of the zone emitter files (*.emt in the EQ dir) to point to the mp3 instead of the xmi. You can open any zone_emt file in your EQ dir with a text editor to see what I mean.

If you are using my soundfont to play back the in game MIDI music, it should work perfectly fine with VMS. Your soundfont chain is correct (synthusr-samplefix-BASSMIDI.sf2 only). If it's not working, then it's likely VMS is not set as the default MIDI mapper. Windows 10 has a terrible habit of changing default midi back to the MS synth on my box constantly, and if you recently rolled back it has probably reset the registry values for it. You'll have to use something like Coolsoft's MIDI mapper to change it back. -> https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/midimapper

Bob thanks again for your help, your program definitely works and i do have midi mapper set up as such below.

my question to you and anyone else, does it feel like music does not trigger often enough? is there a fix or confirmation into this?

[Gustoo]

Nothing can sound better than original MIDI I hope nirgon is working around the clock to correct this.

My music doesn’t trigger reliably like in combat and stuff it’s odd.

[foxchris509]

Pretty cool thanks for this! Sounds great im really diggin it

[bivouac]

Thanks for sharing a way to hear this music as it was meant to sound! I enjoyed it in P99 for a while, but I had to stop using it after I ran into some technical issues between VirtualMIDISynth and other games.

In December, I read someone's post on the P99 reddit about adding new music into Kunark zones using a tool to convert the sound trigger files into the newer, less cryptic, EMT format. Since then, I've done a similar conversion for all Trilogy zones with Maestrobob's mp3 transfers instead.

TrilogyEMT v0.1

The install is detailed in the readme, but it's basically drag-and-drop into your EQ folder. The EMT conversions aren't perfect and there's more I hope to add to them. Please share any feedback if you try it out.

[Maestrobob]

Originally Posted by bivouac [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The install is detailed in the readme, but it's basically drag-and-drop into your EQ folder. The EMT conversions aren't perfect and there's more I hope to add to them. Please share any feedback if you try it out.

Thank you, bivouac. This is exactly how I believe the music should be implemented going forward, and how I've personally played P99/TAKP/Live over the past months. It would be great if a package like this were to eventually be added to the official P99 file distribution.

This method fixes many issues with using the current in-game MIDI engine, including the pitch bend modulator not resetting (out of tune notes after a while). It also removes any software synth dependency and should work the same for everyone on all configurations.

The only major downside is that any global .xmi (gl.xmi) music, with the exception of combattheme1/2 and deaththeme, will still rely on MIDI playback since there are no EMTs associated with them.

Here are my trilogy EMTs for comparison -> http://bit.ly/2MZJyC6

The mp3 names in my package are changed to match the XMPlay output from my mp3 zip, otherwise the data should match.