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

[paronga]

First, thank you so much to you excellent talented people for working on this project. Music is such a key part of any video game.

I know this a long shot, does anyone know how to get this sort of thing working under linux/macOS under wine?

[vans21emu]

Does this still works? it seems some of the link is dead

[Arkaan]

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

*Most of the Information I found to complete this was taken from http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=8893&

By changing your systems MIDI soundfont, you can recreate the AWE32 Soundblaster sound which is how the music was meant to be heard in EQ! (the MIDI soundfont that windows comes with by default is pretty terrible)

Preview the sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWj-...&feature=g-upl
(you may not be super impressed but in comparison its a lot better, im too lazy to upload a comparison video, maybe i will at a later date)

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HOW TO:
1.) Download 1mgm.sf2 to Desktop or any location [download]
2.) install bassmididrv.exe [download]
3.) Run BASSMIDI Driver Configuration
4.) "Add" 1mgm.sf2 to soundfonts and click "Apply"
5.) Go to Advanced tab, under Default MIDI Synth, select BASSMIDI Driver and hit "Apply"
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You can google "MIDI soundfont Banks" to see if you find any you like better

You might notice a little bit of glitchyness in the video with the sound, i think that's only because my fraps was running.

Enjoy!

Noticed you are suggesting to load 1MGM.sf2.

This is a compacted 1MB soundfont with GM fonts only. This was the ROM preloaded in the AWE32 line of cards from Creative.

There are several, much more rich fonts available. 1MGM.sf2 has larger variants such as 4GMGSMT.SF2 or CT4MGM.SF2. These are copyright, but if you can get your hands on an old school AWE64 Gold installation CD you will find them there.

If your goal is to make EQ music "sound like it used to in 1999" then it depends on what you were hearing. Windows 98 defaulted to MS GS Wavetable Synth regardless of soundcard. You may want to search the web for a better version of the built in windows soundbank, gm.dls.

If your goal is to make the music not have issues such as skipping and clipping then you need another synthesizer. I wont recommend building a computer with ISA slots and getting a 20 year old AWE64 Gold. Software can fix these issues nicely.

In either event, I recommend OmniMIDI https://github.com/KeppySoftware/OmniMIDI

This software allows you to load various soundbanks. It is a fork of BASSMIDI but is more updated and robust.

Once you have loaded the soundfont you can change the default midi device in Windows 10 by editing the registry under Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\M icrosoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 for 64 bit OS or Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Win dows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 for 32 bit OS

There will be a REG_SZ key named "midi" which points to wdmaud.drv by default. This is the default windows audio driver which also contains Microsoft's software synth.

You should see your custom synth listed as "midi1" with the registered driver name.
Just copy the string from "midi1" and paste it into "midi"

To revert to default just make sure "midi" says "wdmaud.drv"

[Arkaan]

If you havent yet heard EQ music using 4GMGSMT.SF2 or CT4MGM.SF2 (they are the same) I would highly recommend doing so. This was the default font on SoundBlaster Live

[mischief419]

2nd link broken.

[Arkaan]

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

Ah yes... the boat music. Here's what I remember from the year 2000! The boat music was always a little bit... buggy? It definitely didn't loop continuously though. I also don't think there was any other music, at least when taking the old world boats like from from Freeport to BB.

I'm an auditor on EQClassic, which uses the trilogy client. As far as I can tell, all of the .xmi triggers there seem to work exactly as I remember. I made a recording of the boat ride from FP to BB with the music below so you can hear exactly what happens.

https://youtu.be/YAZZuaonjpU

You can hear the music plays through completely once then loops once, but with most of the channels muted. Eventually the all come back in and then it ends. What's interesting is as soon as a different .xmi trigger event happens (for example the battle music), the boat music starts over again, etc. I'm thinking the .xmi was always on a zone-wide trigger, but after one loop, it's supposed to drop all of the channel volume to 0 until the next trigger. Just a hypothesis, as I haven't dove into the deep end yet.

I'm definitely curious to see what you can come up with on this issue.

This music is also in Dagnors at the center island.

[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