UPDATE: My MIDI sound isn't working in dosbox
UPDATE2: SOLVED! THANK YOU EVERYONE!

My son has a dell t3600 workstation for his gaming machine (I bought it for $40 as scrap and fixed it up - has ssd now, otherwise it's as listed - 64gb ecc, nvidia 660ti, not sure about the mobo, bunch of cores in an Intel xeon chip).

It's not meant to be a gaming pc, but it works great as one.

He's running Linux mint on it. He wants to play elder scrolls arena, his first dosbox game.

I installed the game using wine and tried to run the game from the command line.

- dosbox
- mount c...
Then in the command line of dosbox, I run the command "a" which runs the game.

In my Linux command line, it throws errors concerning my sound.

My error is:
DOSBox version 0.74
Copyright 2002-2010 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL.
---
CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/administrator/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
MIXER:Got different values from SDL: freq 44100, blocksize 512
ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
MIDI:Opened device:none

And indeed, I get no sounds.

I have pc speaker turned off. Volumes are all up. Other sounds in applications work normally.

I have confirmed that I'm using alsa. I have sound for all other games (he's got a portal 2 and warlock of fire mountain running just fine).

I've tried putzing around with the dosbox config file but I haven't a clue what I'm doing. I set some default settings to alsa, but no effect.

Has anyone run into this? Does anyone know what to do from here?

Thanks!

I'm winging this since I don;t have a linux install handy to check:

Note in your error the mididevice appears to be set to none. As I understand it, it should be set to alsa.

Discussion here:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=28672

Please try that.

Hope this helps

edit: Just saw that after I wrote my response. Not sure since the error does say 'none'. Can you post the dosbox.conf file that you're currently using? After your son wakes up of course. :)

Have you tried to reconfigure the sound and music for the game? Run INSTALL.EXE in dosbox, set the sound and music card to Sound Blaster, run the game with ARENA.BAT and check if you have sound and music (you always can try to configure MIDI for the music later when the sound works).

If that doesn't work you may need to provide more information which commands you exactly run in dosbox or what dosbox configuration file you use.

When you have you also can try out a different dosbox game to check if the missing sound is a problem with Arena or a general problem with your dosbox installation. You do not need to install DOS games with Wine, you also can extract the files from the installer with "innoextract".

You guys are smart!

So I've only got midi issues now.

eiii's hint to run the install and run the game with ARENA instead of A got the sound effects working. However, still no midi.

Here is my config file:

(GOG forum isn't liking the config file, so I'm going to just put some parts in it that appear relevant)

Oh, first, my actual error is here:

DOSBox version 0.74
Copyright 2002-2010 DOSBox Team, published under GNU GPL.
---
CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/administrator/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
MIXER:Got different values from SDL: freq 44100, blocksize 512
ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
MIDI:Opened device:none

I think GOG doesn't like the brackets, but I'm not sure.

CONFIG FILE:

Mixer section:
nosound=false
rate=44100
blocksize=1024
prebuffer=20


MIDI section:
mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=default
midiconfig=


SOUND BLASTER PART:
sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplemu=default
oplrate=44100

GUS part:
gus=false
gusrate=44100
gusbase=240
gusirq=5
gusdma=3
ultradir=C:\ULTRASND


PC Speaker part:
pcspeaker=true
pcrate=44100
tandy=auto
tandyrate=44100
disney=true

DOS part:
xms=true
ems=true
umb=true
keyboardlayout=auto


And then I have an autoexec of:
mount c /home/administrator/.wine/dosdevices/c:
c:
cd progra~1/tesare~1/arena/

For midi playback, try installing these two packages: fluidsynth fluid-soundfont-gm

Then before trying to play, open a terminal and run this command (let it run in the background while playing, type "quit" and press enter when done with it): fluidsynth --audio-driver=pulseaudio /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2

I have slow internet on this machine so adamhm's suggestion is currently downloading.

I had an idea to just try to play a midi file in media player and media player said I couldn't do it and I needed this file:
gstream1.0-plugins-bad (i386)
GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set

So after I download the midi synth table, I'm going to try to get this GStreamer plugin and see if that just solves my problems system-wide.

I'll keep you updated. Thanks guys!

Alrighty.

So I reset my dosbox config file using dosbox --resetconf

Then made my autoexec changes


I first tried running it normally without pulseaudio just to see if the gstream1.0-plugins-bad(i386) had any effect. No effect.

Then I tried running Fluidsynth and got this:

administrator@TheJukeBox ~ $ fluidsynth --audio-driver=pulseaudio /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2
FluidSynth version 1.1.6
Copyright (C) 2000-2012 Peter Hanappe and others.
Distributed under the LGPL license.
SoundFont(R) is a registered trademark of E-mu Systems, Inc.

fluidsynth: warning: Failed to pin the sample data to RAM; swapping is possible.
fluidsynth: Using PulseAudio driver
Type 'help' for help topics.

> fluidsynth: warning: Failed to set thread to high priority
fluidsynth: warning: Failed to set thread to high priority


Both do not yield midi sounds in dosbox. And both yielded the same error when running dosbox:

CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/administrator/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf
MIXER:Got different values from SDL: freq 44100, blocksize 512
ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
MIDI:Opened device:none


Keep the ideas coming if you have them. I'll mess around too. Either way, thanks guys! He's at least got sound effects. He can play a sountrack in the background. :)

I still use timidity, not fluidsynth, and for timidity I have to set "midiconfig=128:0". I do not know where this number comes from, but without it MIDI does not work for me. Maybe it also helps in your case. :) To get the music you always can set the "Music Card" to Sound Blaster with INSTALL.EXE (or manually adjust the ARENA.BAT file). A working MIDI emulation just gives the better music quality.

That did it! I'm operational. Thank you everyone!

To save you slapping around these files, why not look into something like Dosbox Game Launcher?

I'll need to look into this! Thanks!

Just as an aside, do we have a pastebin we can use for when a copy and paste won't work?

Under Linux the default software MIDI ports start around 128:0, IIRC. By default DOSBox isn't looking at that port. Which means you always need to change it. I didn't see how to forward a lower port to a higher one.
I could have sworn I used aplay -l, but at least on this PC it's aplaymidi -l to list MIDI ports. Timidity creates several ports, but it's usually the first one. With fluidsynth it's just the one. Like eiii said you need to change in the DOSBox conf file under the [midi] section midiconfig= to the correct port, e.g. midiconfig=128:0.

Thanks to Tallima pointing me to MIDI I had to look up myself where this port number comes from. And I found "aconnect -o" which also lists the available MIDI ports.
Trying to help other people often helps yourself to understand things better. :)

I'll try changing those midi ports (and looking them up). Maybe the sound will be better.