Aug 27, 2007
How To: VirtualBox MIDI in an XP guest
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
ere’s a tough one to get an answer for: why is it that when you have a valid ALSA0 MIDI device that every other application–be it Qt or Gtk–can access, VirtualBox fails to connect to it? The documentation suggests its virtual sound card should support it, and even if it doesn’t the Microsoft synth should kick in, right?
Nope.
To fix this problem and get music in all your old Windows games, we have to travel back to the land of 1995. Namely, we need to revisit WinGroove.
In 1995, MIDI was a luxury. Creative’s SoundFont technology did not exist. If you wanted more than SoundBlaster16 compatibility, you had to shell out mad cash for a Roland wavetable or one of Yamaha’s shiny XG cards with a several-hundred-dollar price tag.
The solution was WinGroove, a softsynth written by a nice Japanese guy named HIRO. Damaged Cybernetics rather infamously hosted a crack for the old, old 0.8 version of the software. The last major release was 0.9E, and a beta update was made available as WinGroove 0.A4 Beta-2.
Since 0.A4 had XP compatibility, that’s what we’re going to use for this tutorial. The only problem is, his installer is totally borked, and double clicking does nothing but extracts some files. It took some playing around, but I banged out a solution.
When you run the downloaded wg0a4_e.exe, it will extract its files to C:\WG0A4.TMP, so hit Win+R and run cmd. Type the following:
cd \WG0A4.TMP WGINSTLR.EXE FULLSET.LST
Scroll to the bottom and begin your installation. When it’s all done, tell the installer you want to use WinGroove as a MIDI device and let it reboot your computer. When it comes back up, open Control Panel and double click the Sounds and Audio Devices option. Click on the Audio tab, and where it says “MIDI music playback,” select “WinGroove (NT)” from the drop-down.
You’re all set!
Now whenever you run old Windows games that used MIDI to fill in their BGM, you’ll be able to hear the sounds.
If you don’t want to use WinGroove, Yamaha released several softsynth programs based on their XG series of cards. These, however, have considerably more overhead.
If you are a masochist who laughs in the face of hardware demands and cares nothing about emulating SoundFont technology inside an emulated OS, you could try my old guide on how to use TiMIDIty++ as a Windows MIDI device using MIDI Yoke.
Man, I wish this worked. It just hangs for me on “creating wingroove icon”.
Do you have that directory already unzipped? I’d love a zip file of it, if you do! Thanks in advance!
rhY
If I recall right, it should hang but the files will still end up in that folder …
Is it not creating the temp folder?
Contact me on an IM service or e-mail me and I’ll try to help.