Revision as of 23:03, 25 February 2007

Overview

TiMidity is a software synthesizer that can load SoundFonts and GUS (Gravis Ultrasound) patches and render midi instruments as "real" ones.

Odamex has no timidity support on windows, however, a driver has been made available and can be used for any windows program that supports midi playback.

Installation

This is a basic installation guide that will show you how to use GUS patches with the timidity driver and thus use it with Odamex

You shouldn't need Timidity++ itself, as the driver should do all the work (this hasn't been tested without it though)

GUS patches

You can download these from various sources on the web, Google is a good start, patches are also available at the bottom of this article.

Install these to a directory such as c:\timidity (the directory can be configured in c:\windows\timidity.cfg once the driver has been installed)

Note: If you're using eawpats, copy the timidity.cfg file from its directory and replace c:\windows\timidity.cfg (presuming you have installed timidity previously), modify the lines that contain dir and replace the path with the path of the eawpats dir.

Timidity driver

The latest driver can be downloaded from here (the US sourceforge site has an older project, this one has the latest CVS releases), you will need to download the latest CVS (timiditydrv070209_bin.zip was tested and works on Windows XP SP2)

Extract to a location on your hard disk

Follow the instructions in windrv.txt in the zip file or:

Navigate to: Start->Settings->Control Panel->Add Hardware Wizard
Click Next
Click "Yes, I have already connected the hadware."
Click Next
Select "Add a new Hardware device" 
Click Next
Select "Install the hardware that manually select from list[Advanced]" 
Click Next
Select "sound, video and game contollers" 
Click Next
Click "Have Disk ..."
Click "Browse" and find timiditydrv.INF where you extracted it
Click OK
Click "Continue Anyway"
Click Finish.

The driver is now installed.

Usage

To use the driver, do the following:

Navigate to: Start->Settings->Control Panel->Sounds and Audio Devices
Click Audio Tab
Select "MIDI music playback" combobox as "Timidity++ Driver"
Click OK

The driver is now the default midi driver, for more information on configuration, read windrv.txt from your driver dir for more info.

If all goes well, you can run Odamex and the sound should come through the driver.

Notes

There is a problem with SDL_mixer not changing the volume of the driver, so changing the music volume in Odamex (and even other programs that use SDL_mixer) won't work, there is no known workaround for this.

External Links

TiMidity++ sourceforge site

Japanese TWSYNTH page (latest driver)

eawpats GUS patches