A follow-up to my previous announcement: I got a reply from The Fat Man, and he graciously allowed free use of his FM timbres, on the condition that his copyright notice is included in any software in which they are included. Seems very reasonable to me. ☺️ I therefore added the MIDI/OPL2/TOOLS/ folder that I left out earlier, and added a LICENSE.md file that contains the copyright notice that he proposed.
The FM timbres are useful when you are developing a DOS game for which you have music assets in General MIDI format, but you also want to support sound cards or sound devices with OPL2/OPL3 FM synthesizer chips, such as Adlib, Sound Blaster, etc. A similar mapper for the Roland MT32 synthesizer appears to be included in the VBE/AI SDK as well, but I'm not sure if that is also developed by The Fat Man. Again, I hope any of this is useful in some way to you retro DOS game developers out there. 😃 By the way, we could use some help "porting" the C/C++ code in the VBE/AI SDK so that it can be compiled by Open Watcom. Right now, the code contains "far pascal" keywords, which unfortunately are specific to Borland (Turbo) C/C++. Here's a link to the GitHub repo again: https://github.com/volkertb/vbe-ai-sdk On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 10:23 PM Volkert <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone! > > Thank Goodness the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of common sense today. > The copying of APIs for the purpose of implementation in original work is > considered Fair Use! 🥳 > > Also today, as coincidence would have it, someone at VESA responded to my > inquiry on the current legal status of the VBE/AI SDK that has been > floating around the internet. Their response was that VESA no longer > supports VBE/AI and that it is in the public domain, and that we are free > to do with the sources whatever we want. ☺️ > > I therefore unpacked the ZIP file from cd.textfiles.com and published it > to GitHub, with the exception of one subfolder: MIDI/OPL2/TOOLS/. > > The repo can be found at https://github.com/volkertb/vbe-ai-sdk > > The reason why I left that one subfolder out of the repository is because > it contained files copyrighted by The Fat Man, with non-free terms of use. > Specifically, those are thimbres for OPL2 and OPL3 FM synthesizer chips as > found in many sound cards back in the '90s. > > I've emailed George Sanger (a.k.a. "The Fat Man") with the question of > whether he would be open to releasing those files as open source. If he > agrees, I'll add that subfolder to the repository in a later commit. > However, those files shouldn't be required when you're writing new VBE/AI > sound drivers. As far as I understand it, you might only need those > thimbres when you want to support the VBE/AI Adlib driver in your game and > have a properly sounding instrument mapping when your game music is > composed according to the General MIDI specification. But I digress. > > I also added the VBE/AI 1.0 specification document in PDF format > <https://github.com/volkertb/vbe-ai-sdk/blob/main/VBEAI100.pdf> to the > repository, so it's a one-stop shop for anybody here who'd like to take a > stab at writing standard open source DOS audio drivers and/or > applications/games making use of such drivers. > > The SDK also contains some existing VBE/AI drivers for Sound Blaster, > Adlib, Disney Sound Source and MPU-401 MIDI. Those are binary-only, > however. But if those are now public domain as well, perhaps we'll be able > to reverse-engineer the COM files using something like Ghidra. (I've asked > this in a follow-up question to VESA. I'll let you know if I get a more > specific answer on that as well.) > > I hope all of this will be a useful piece of the puzzle w.r.t. scratching > off the "*Drivers for modern, unsupported hardware*" item from the (Free)DOS > development wishlist > <http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/(Free)DOS_development_wishlist> > . ☺️ > > I've been working on the development of a VBE/AI driver for Intel ICHx > AC'97 devices in my spare time, but I'm not very experienced in low level > assembly and C development, so progress has been slow. Any help is welcome, > though! 😃 > > It would be nice to see VBE/AI drivers for modern sound devices such as > these: > > - AC'97/ICHx (like what I've been working on) > - Intel HD Audio > - USB Audio > - VirtIO (paravirtualized) Sound Driver > - Popular PCI sound cards (SB Live, Audigy, etc) > - OPL2LPT/OPL3LPT > - MIDI over RS-232 > - Some other cool stuff that I'm undoubtedly missing here > > Note that the VBE/AI sources currently include the "far pascal" keyword > that gcc-ia16 doesn't support yet. That's being looked into, though. > <https://github.com/tkchia/gcc-ia16/issues/45#issuecomment-812819327> > (Help with that is welcome too, of course!) > > Anyway, I hope this is useful to at least some of you. > > have a great day/evening/night, everyone! 🤗 > > Volkert >
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