Duke Nukem 3d midis in zdoom

It seems like a few of the Duke 3d midis (such as "pob" and "missimp") don't play correctly in zdoom. Does anyone know what causes this, and if it's possible to fix?

When you say don't play "correctly", I assume you mean one of the following:

(1) They get royally messed up when converted to MUS. The solution: don't do this. :P
(2) They don't sound the same as they do in Duke3D. This is because Lee Jackson, bizarrely, duplicated (nearly) every track in the MIDIs and assigned them a different instrument. FM synthesis sound cards play the songs with these alternate instruments. The game plays them on the normal instruments.
(3) They don't loop properly. A side effect of (1) - MUS doesn't support the loop point controllers in MIDI.
(4) Some instrments play a key or two lower than they should. This one mystifies me, to be honest. (Certain other perpetrators are GOTHAM and PLASMA.) Try changing your MIDI device and see how they get played then.

Is this helpful? :)

Or maybe it's that one:

(5) They don't play the same as in a normal MIDI player that doesn't know about the Apogee extensions. But if you compare with how they play in Duke 3D, they do play the same.

They work fine in Prboom.
I use Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth in zdoom.

Looping isn't the problem, Pissed Office Box sounds messed up right the the beginning.

Using this as a reference, it sounds normally to me. The instruments aren't as good as in that YouTube record but that's just a question of MS's wavetable being a poor travesty of the Roland VSC.

When I play it in zdoom the notes play at the wrong time and the instruments are all wrong. In the video the instruments are just a little different.

Works for me, so I dunno what's up on your side.

Did you convert or modify the file in any way?

Can you record your ZDoom playing the song and your PrBoom doing the same?

I assume this is for your community chest map? I'm not very familiar with the project, but isn't one of the requirements using nothing beyond the basic boom featureset? If that's the case, then you should really stay away from apogee emids. Preprocess them to regular arse mids first.

It works in PrBoom, and it's probably fine in Boom too.

I changed the music to something else, but I'd still be intrested in learning what causes this.

I don't think anyone can help you without the reference recordings I asked.

By the way, I'm still not convinced that Boom is right and ZDoom wrong in their rendition of a MIDI that uses custom Apogee controllers which are implemented in ZDoom but not in Boom.

Just changed the MIDI player to FMOD, works fine now.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Gez said:

By the way, I'm still not convinced that Boom is right and ZDoom wrong in their rendition of a MIDI that uses custom Apogee controllers which are implemented in ZDoom but not in Boom.

I agree with you. I'm pretty sure SDL_Mixer doesn't implement any of the apogee stuff, and I know for sure that the midi code I wrote doesn't.