[Goku7]

I was wondering if you could try to develop an SPU plugin that gave the option of letting you use your MIDI hardware on games like FF8,FF9, etc.

Now, I know that in most cases that approach would sound terrible because you can't load the samples into the Hardware MIDI port, but the samples on FF9 (the game I'm trying to get to run smoothely), are NEARLY IDENTICAL to the samples on my XG hardware device.

Why am I asking this? Two reasons:

1. Because I'm pretty sure people are curious if it'll actually work;

2. my processor is simply not fast enough to smoothely emulate the MIDI aspect of the SPU in current plugins. The obvious answer would be to upgrade the dang thing, but I won't be able to get the money to do so for probably another year or two.

 

[dpence]

This has been tossed around a few times and the answer is no.
Not because they don't want to do it, but because the PSX Midi is not true midi. Midi inturment 1 isnot always a Piano like PC midi, sometimes it may be drums, other times it might be a flute. You never know what instrument it will be and tere is no way to know during emulation. The SPU programmers would have to encode (Possibly in an .ini file) the correct tracks to make them match up with games individually, and thats a LOT of work and trial and error.

 

[Goku7]

Rats. I forgot about that.

Still, couldn't they build a list from tracking the game's calls to the SPU to load the MIDI samples, and (obviously the process would be slow, but at least it's a start) start looking for some sort of ID header for each sample that they could then "remap" to a general MIDI instrument?

Think about this: SquareSoft, the company whose games are the best but are a pain to emulate, probably uses the same sample set list throughout their game series. In other words, I doubt they would radically change their list of Instrument Patch Numbers for each subsequent game. If I'm right (I probably am, it sounds reasonable to me, but if anyone has experienced otherwise please tell me.), and if someone did compile a PSX to General MIDI translation list, then one list could work for what, 3,4,5 games at a time? That sure sounds like a good chunk of games compared to a 1:1 individual list.

If the option was feasible, probably games from SquareSoft would benefit the most from it, since it seems other companies prefer to use XA audio.

Maybe I'm grasping at straws here.....

 

[Pete Bernert]

There is nothing like Midi in psx spu emulation... the spu gets (compressed) sample data, not infos like "play instrument xyz"... so it's more like playing a .wav file, you see?

 

[Goku7]

Really? I thought it was a type of MIDI, like the way computers use DownLoadable Sounds for games like FF8. Also, the fact that the SPU can control the sample playback using an ADSR envelope made it sound like it was using MIDI controllers, which in turn made it appear to be a synthesizer.

Just out of curiousity, has there ever been an attempt by anyone to code an spu plugin to try to use a system's MIDI hardware port to emulate that function of the SPU?

One more (reasonable to ask) question: Do the SPU's that use DirectSound (I suppose that would be all of them except for maybe the MIDAS one) take advantage of PCI Soundcards (like SB LIVE!, Yamaha DS-XG, Aureal Vortex, etc.) that have "Hardware Buffers" to speed up sound processing, or even completely take the load off the CPU itself?