DOS ain't dead

Maybe in the past I have heard something about OpenMPT123 but Ithought that it is some library for some Windows sound stuff.
But suprisingly it can work in DOS, it contains a command line DOS module player and it is still very active project.
Look here: https://lib.openmpt.org/libopenmpt/download/

Personaly I prefer to use MPXplay with plugin for listening MODs., XMs, S3Ms...
but it can be interresting for someone.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> Maybe in the past I have heard something about OpenMPT123 but Ithought that
> it is some library for some Windows sound stuff.
> But suprisingly it can work in DOS, it contains a command line DOS module
> player and it is still very active project.
> Look here: https://lib.openmpt.org/libopenmpt/download/
>
> Personaly I prefer to use MPXplay with plugin for listening MODs., XMs,
> S3Ms...
> but it can be interresting for someone.

Personally, I prefer Open Cubic Player for most of the formats
https://www.cubic.org/player/

and Impulse Tracker for the ITs
http://www.users.on.net/~jtlim/ImpulseTracker/

Yes, both are quite old but they still work perfectly for the tracks
collected way back in the later 1980's and early to mid 1990's
(downloaded from Rusty and Edie's dialup BBS)
http://timeline.textfiles.com/1987/05/11/1/FILES/page-22.htm


Remember those days ?

We connected to a local dialup BBS via our blindingly fast 14,400 baud modems
and downloaded files using the zmodem protocol.

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http://glennmcc.org/

> Maybe in the past I have heard something about OpenMPT123 but Ithought that
> it is some library for some Windows sound stuff.
> But suprisingly it can work in DOS, it contains a command line DOS module
> player and it is still very active project.
> Look here: https://lib.openmpt.org/libopenmpt/download/
>
> Personaly I prefer to use MPXplay with plugin for listening MODs., XMs,
> S3Ms...
> but it can be interresting for someone.

It is very interesting and modern project, however it does not play sound on any modern PCI soundcards. It would be interesting to compile this without the old Allegro sound libraries and use the modern PCI-sound drivers in the code of MPXPlay instead.

Another interesting Module player is MikMod:

http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/

It claims to be able to be compilable for DOS, but no DOS binaries are included. I could use some help in getting a DOS binary compiled, get errors in CWSDPMI and gcc. There is a very old 1.x binary version for DOS called "Extended MikMod":

https://modland.com/pub/software/players/DOS/Extended%20MikMod/

Also, I see Dumb module player is still being actively supported in source, but there is NO DOS binaries:

https://github.com/kode54/dumb

This fork adds great sinc re-sampling and other goodies that would make it the BEST player for DOS, period. If anyone has any DOS compilation tips, they'd be most helpful!

It has a wonderful diskwriter program (dumb2wav) which I can't get this to compile under Watcom or gcc and DJGPP, either. The acctual player also relies on the old Allegro sound libraries which of course wouldn't work in DOS for PCI-based IDH or ICH8 or ICH9 "modern" embedded cards.

With the dumb2wav program one could "dump" MODs at the ultimate quality to disk, then actually play the .WAVs with MpxPlay. That would be a solution.

> Another interesting Module player is MikMod:
>
> http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/
>
> It claims to be able to be compilable for DOS, but no DOS binaries are
> included. I could use some help in getting a DOS binary compiled, get
> errors in CWSDPMI and gcc.

Well, it is easy to build: Go into libmikmod/dos and build libmikmod
using Makefile.dj (edit the makefile and/or config.h if you want to.)
Copy mikmod.h and the newly generated libmikmod.a into mikmod/dos and
build using Makefile.dj. Anyways, here is a dos/djgpp build from the
latest git repo: http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/tmp/mikmod-dos.zip
It supports SB output (also includes GUS and WSS drivers but they have
never been tested by me.)

> > Another interesting Module player is MikMod:
> >
> > http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/
> >
> > It claims to be able to be compilable for DOS, but no DOS binaries are
> > included. I could use some help in getting a DOS binary compiled, get
> > errors in CWSDPMI and gcc.
>
> Well, it is easy to build: Go into libmikmod/dos and build libmikmod
> using Makefile.dj (edit the makefile and/or config.h if you want to.)
> Copy mikmod.h and the newly generated libmikmod.a into mikmod/dos and
> build using Makefile.dj. Anyways, here is a dos/djgpp build from the
> latest git repo: http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/tmp/mikmod-dos.zip
> It supports SB output (also includes GUS and WSS drivers but they have
> never been tested by me.)

Thank you.

FYI... it works GREAT and is currently playing an Impulse Tracker .IT file
and in Linux dosbox to-boot.

Will now reboot into OpenDos v7.01 to test it there.

BRB

Also works like a charm booted to DOS

Thanks again... that's another track player added to my collection. :)

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--
http://glennmcc.org/

> Copy mikmod.h and the newly generated libmikmod.a into mikmod/dos and
> build using Makefile.dj. Anyways, here is a dos/djgpp build from the
> latest git repo: http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/tmp/mikmod-dos.zip

Thank you! I wasn't copying the libmikmod.a or mikmod.h files properly! No wonder it didn't compile using DJGPP!

Really appreciate your DOS binary compile of MikMod.

I got the old version of dumb 0.9.3 player here:


http://dumb.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=downloads

to compile (for DJGPP), but not the newer fork here:

https://github.com/kode54/dumb

Are you able to try? It would be outstanding to have a DOS version. I'm using old version of gcc, perhaps that is why I can't compile it, I get many compilation errors and no binary.

> to compile (for DJGPP), but not the newer fork here:
>
> https://github.com/kode54/dumb
>
> Are you able to try?

Oh-ho, allegro dependencies _and_ your christmas family fun of cmake..
Nope, won't try.

> > to compile (for DJGPP), but not the newer fork here:
> >
> > https://github.com/kode54/dumb
> >
> > Are you able to try?
>
> Oh-ho, allegro dependencies _and_ your christmas family fun of cmake..
> Nope, won't try.

Understandable. cmake is your family fruit cake, alright! I was really only trying to get the dumb2wav (diskwriter) file built, I couldn't care less about the actual dumb player, since we have MPXPlay which can actually play the .WAVs which dumb2wav.exe will write to disk. And Allegro sound library is obsolete, now with MPXPlay's DOS PCI drivers and support.

Your new DOS build of MikMod is outstanding, with its text interface, diskwriter support, etc.

By the way, the rather bloated Open MPT123 (2.38 mb DOS binary, 800kb UPX'ed) does not have any built in diskwriter support. It only has wonky --stdout options, however this seems to produce something playable by MPXPlay, ie:

openmpt123 --stdout --no-float yourfile.mod > yourfile.pcm

But, then you have to know that this outputs 44100 khz, signed, 16-bit word-length, 2-channel audio to actually convert that output to .WAV with sox:

sox -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w -t raw yourfile.pcm -t wav yourfile.wav

> It is very interesting and modern project, however it does not play sound
> on any modern PCI soundcards. It would be interesting to compile this
> without the old Allegro sound libraries and use the modern PCI-sound
> drivers in the code of MPXPlay instead.

:(
maybe sezeroz could bundle it with libau from Q2DOS to make DOS sound great again :)

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Well I tried it under real DOS with my 2nd soundcard PCI Yamaha YMF724 and it plays good. Except the MikMod player leave playing last samples from DMA buffer endlessly after exit. OpenMPT123 correctly mute the output at exit.
I tried to recompile LibMikMod and the player from sources and it works fine, no messing with configure, just make, any warnings...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Except the MikMod player leave playing last samples from DMA
> buffer endlessly after exit.

Is it my build from current libmikmod git or that ancient version
at modland?

The new 3.2.9 that I just rebuild from sources.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> The new 3.2.9 that I just rebuild from sources.

Which driver are you using? Do you have a patch?

(I was only able to test the SB driver as SB16 a
long time ago when I pushed a fix to it.)

I didn't explicitly specified any driver, just run mikmod.exe and played a module file. I think it's autodetected or SB16. The YMF724 PCI driver dsdma.exe emulates SB16. Maybe there is some inacuracy or quirk, I can only say that compared to OpenMPT123 that properly terminates the playback...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> I didn't explicitly specified any driver, just run mikmod.exe and played a
> module file. I think it's autodetected or SB16. The YMF724 PCI driver
> dsdma.exe emulates SB16. Maybe there is some inacuracy or quirk, I can only
> say that compared to OpenMPT123 that properly terminates the playback...

Without further knowledge, I can't do anything about it and I don't have
that hardware to test it. (I had only tested it with a real SB16 back in
the day.)

Please send a patch if you ever find a fix for it.

Sorry, my knowledge about sound programming is ~0 so I will not going dive in to it as long as I can use MPXplay with module plugin that works well enough for me...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

BTW why mikmod is creating its config files in C:\ instead of directory where the exe is placed?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.