dosbox: ensure freepats soundfonts are configured

[cmitu]

In Buster, the default soundfont configured in Timidity is fluidr3_gm. Without it, timidity logs an error during the runcommand startup for dosbox and the emulator is not started:

   /etc/timidity/fluidr3_gm.cfg: No such file or directory
   timidity: Error reading configuration file.
   Please check /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg

We could use the fluid-soundfont-gm as default (and remove freepats), that would require to modifying /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg . On the other hand, the fluid-soundfont-gm is considerably larger than freepats (149MB vs 34MB).

[psyke83]

Grepping /usr/bin/timidity, I see %s/.timidity.cfg. This looks like a user override (i.e. /home/pi/.timidity.cfg). Perhaps we could try that?

I don't mind using fluidsynth, but as you said, the package is considerably larger, and may also affect memory usage. I do recall the MIDI playback being quite different as well.

[cmitu]

I agree, I'll see if we can override with a user configuration file and keep using freepats.

[cmitu]

Unfortunately the user config ($HOME/.timidity.cfg) is not an override, but an addition to the main .cfg and it's read after the system config. I have added a helper function to deal with the system config (/etc/timidify/timidity.cfg) and modified also the +Start DosBox.sh script to not loop indefinitely, just in case there is an error during timidity startup.

[hhromic]

Be aware that dosbox is not the only module using freepats, perhaps _config_soundfonts_freepats_dosbox() can be migrated to helpers and be run from any module using it.

[cmitu]

@hhromic Thanks for the pointer - I'll take a look. I see zdoom and eduke have freepats and timidity, I'll give it a test.

[cmitu]

So, there are 2 additional scriptmodules including freepats and/or timidity

• (ports) zdoom . By default, it uses the system's MIDI device, whatever it is. It has options to switch to different MIDI devices, including timidity. When selected, it uses timidity directly to play the MIDI files. If the config file is incorrect (the issue at hand), then playing the background music sound fails.
  zdoom does however has an OPL software synth' option built in, which works without any soundfonts installed.

• (ports) eduke32. It supports MIDI playback through a built-in SDL_Mixer based synth or through the EDUKE_MUSIC_CMD environment variable. During testing, I used pmidi (with timidity started in the background) to play music, of course this doesn't work when timidity configuration fails.

Both zdoom and eduke32 are not using by default timidity, they must be configured specifically. For eduke32 there is no configuration option to choose the MIDI playback command, zdoom has the options in the Sound Configuration screen.

[joolswills]

I have edited the base for this to point to the new branch for fkms/rpi4/buster. Hope that's ok - let me know and I'll merge. Thanks.

[psyke83]

I've revisited this, and think that the solution being implemented here may be a bit overkill. The point of my midi_synth function was to avoid the need to install timidity-daemon or otherwise make any system modifications outside the scope of /opt/retropie.

It seems to me that appending the configuration will work OK, and we don't even need to use ~/.timidity.cfg. Simply changing timidity -Os -iAD & to timidity -Os -iAD -c /etc/timidity/freepats.cfg & should be sufficient. The only downside is that if /etc/timidity/fluidr3_gm.cfg is already installed, it may be used before freepats, but I don't think that's a huge deal?

[cmitu]

That's a better solution to this problem. The fluid sound fonts should be of better quality than freepats, so even if they're loaded before, it's ok. I'll add the modifications to the PR, thank you for the suggestion.

[cmitu]

Based on @psyke83's suggestion, I've removed the helper and just start timidity a 2nd time if it's not starting with the default settings. Unfortunately timidity doesn't set an error code if a config error is found - probably because it forks itself in the background before any configuration is read - so

timidity -Os -iAD || to timidity -Os -iAD -c /etc/timidity/freepats.cfg

always starts 2 instances. I've added a check before trying to stard the 2nd time, so we don't have 2 instances running.

[cmitu]

I'll close this, seems it wasn't a big problem.