Re: some comments re: dosemu 1.1.99 (fwd)

[Dave Phillips <dlphilp@bright.net>]

Stas Sergeev wrote:

> There is only one proper place for that:
> BTS at SourceForge. Attaching the files
> elsewhere has a very big chances of being
> ignored/missed/forgotten. You sent it to
> me privately because these times there was
> no BTS for dosemu.

Hi Stas:

No fear, I have and had no intention of posting the files on this or any 
other list. I'll check out BTS (I'm not familiar with it).

>> I sent M/pc to Stas quite some time
>> ago, he said it worked for him (after hanging on to that Win 2.0 
>> screen for a long time)
>
> I don't remember how exactly it worked for
> me, but I guess it never produced any music
> output. I only remember it started up and
> was functional unless I tried to play music
> with it.
> Only now (right now) I have committed the patch
> that allows vapimpu.com to initialize, and
> therefore M to produce the music. Upgrade your
> dosemu from CVS and find vapimpu.com now
> functional.

Very cool, I'll check it out. However, I should note that I've always 
been able to initialize vapimpu.com as long as :

    1. the version number was appropriate (the last produced versions 
wouldn't work no matter what I tried)
    2. I added the IRQ number

So this invocation :

        vapimpu /IRQ:7

has worked for years.

>> but gave no other details.
>
> Did I? Well, there could be lots of reasons.
> Probably because you haven't tested some patch
> to midid that I did for you, or because you
> were using 1.0.2, or because your page still
> refers to an old, non-functional pc-speaker
> drivers instead of mine that is up-to-date and
> is perfectly functional? :)) Well, I don't
> really remember:) 

I probably left off testing midid after I discovered that linking 
~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi to /dev/snd/midiC1D0 (my ALSA virtual MIDI 
card) responded with much lower latency. But I should check out your 
latest work, IIRC you said you had drastically reduced latency.

I should also mention that I'm typically working on a dozen or more 
projects at a time. I'm not always able to maintain my correspondence, 
and I'm often forced to rather abruptly turn my attention towards 
another project. Sorry about that, it's not personal.

Can you cite where I've referred to using the PC-speaker driver in 
DOSemu ? I don't recall that I've ever mentioned using the speaker 
driver, but I'll gladly remove/update any references to it. I do not 
recommend the PC speaker to anyone actually making music with a computer.

> But jokes aside, the problem might probably be
> your DOS version (try MS-DOS 6.22 or PC-DOS 7
> with setver.exe). And yes, that program still
> hangs on a startup screen for about 2 minutes
> and the mouse doesn't work if you use the
> internal driver (which is justified in that case),
> but other than that it works perfectly here.

Outstanding, that's most encouraging. I'm now using the FreeDOS package 
available from dosemu.org, but I don't find setver in its bin directory. 
Can you recommend a version to use with FreeDOS ?

You may be correct, I had totally forgotten about having to use setver. 
Your response also makes me aware that I *really* need to update or get 
rid of that old page re: using DOSemu to run Sequencer Plus and other 
DOS MIDI apps. I've just completed the rewrite of the Emulators chapter 
for the next edition of my book, the information is up-to-date (for now 
;) and very positive re: using DOSemu to run such apps.

Best regards,

Dave Phillips