Changing soundfonts for DOSbox Midi emulation on Windows 10

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Posts: 4
Joined: 24 Gen 2018 - 17:23
Changing soundfonts for DOSbox Midi emulation on Windows 10

Hey everyone, first time poster here!

Not sure if this is where this needs to go, or if it even needs to be addressed by anyone here, but I'll post this here in case anyone here can help me. I recently formatted and made the switch Windows 10. I am a big fan of classic DOS games, and so I installed DOSbox 0.74. I also have a number of MIDs I created myself way back when, so I installed VirtualMIDISynth to change the soundfont that Windows defaulted to. No problems there; I use Windows Media Player classic to play them, and they sound fine with the new fonts.

However, I noticed that my DOS games in DOSbox sound like they're still using GS Wavetable Synth. I have specified in the .conf files for my games to use VirtualMIDISynth by going under [MIDI] and changing 'config=' to 'config=0' (according to "mixer /listmidi", that is the ID for VirtualMIDISynth) but it doesn't change anything; still sounds like GS Wavetable Synth.

I even went a step further and changed the 'device=default' field to 'device=none' which, unless I'm mistaken, should disable MIDI music in DOSbox, but GS Wavetable Synth STILL plays!

Does anyone here have any ideas as to what's going on?

P.S. I also installed the Coolsoft MIDIMapper to see if that would help, but all of my experiments with that have ended the same way.

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: Changing soundfonts for DOSbox Midi emulation on Windows 10

AFAIK the settings you used for DOSBox are correct, but I'm not such an expert about it.

Dralafi_XIII wrote:
my DOS games in DOSbox sound like they're still using GS Wavetable Synth
A way to be sure DOSBox it's using VMS or not is to look at the About tab of VMS configurator; here you should see the names of MIDI clients currently using VMS.
Another way is to configure a single device in VMS, then open VMS MIDI Mixer and keep it open while DOSBox plays: if you see any activity on the mixer than VMS is used, otherwise your supposition (GS Wavetable Synth) is confirmed.

Posts: 4
Joined: 24 Gen 2018 - 17:23
Re: Changing soundfonts for DOSbox Midi emulation on Windows 10

I figured out the problem.

It WAS something I overlooked; you have to go into your games' settings and tell them to use General MIDI/Roland MT-32 instead of Sound Blaster or Adlib.

Posting here in case anyone else runs into this issue.

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: Changing soundfonts for DOSbox Midi emulation on Windows 10

Thanks for reporting your fix, it will be surely useful to others ;)