[freesci-develop] Request for initial testing

[Christoph Reichenbach]

Hi,

a while back, several people brought up valid complaints about sound timing
being seriously off in the FreeSCI main branch, leading to the new sound
subsystem used in Glutton. I've just committed support for ALSA sequencer
drivers (hardwired to port 64:0, which is external MIDI on my machine, but
you can fix this by changing src/sfx/device/alsa-midi.c L77 for the time
being), which should make this a little more accessible to the general
public-- anyone with an MT-32 and ALSA should be able to get sound play-
back now (other MIDI devices should work as well, but won't use reasonable
instruments and controls).
  Since timing has always been practically perfect for me (except on my
laptop, which happens not to be in a condition for doing anything of use
with it) I'd like to ask anyone who observed audible timing problems and
has the aforementioned setup (ALSA with some MIDI support-- setting up
timidity as an ALSA client might actually suffice for that) to give me
a quick note of whether the timing issues have finally been resolved.


(Please note that song iterator / Sound() interaction is somewhat broken
ATM, so it's possible that you'll encounter places where the wrong
music/sound effect is being played or loops are missed; these are
(probably) unrelated problems.)

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

-- Christoph

(BTW: SysEx loading seems to be much faster with the ALSA sequencer driver
than with rawmidi support, meaning a much improved startup time for MT-32
users-- essentially, ALSA takes care of feeding SysEx information to the
external device while we're already running through the first couple of
SCI methods.)