DOSMid - a low-requirements MIDI player for DOS

Copyright © 2014-2023 Mateusz Vistelink

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Intro

DOSMid is a MIDI and MUS player for DOS. It's a real mode application designed to run on very modest hardware configurations. It plays standard MIDI files, as well as MIDI in RIFF (ie. RMID), and MUS tunes (as used by Id Software in numerous games like Doom, Heretic, Hexen, etc).

DOSMid requires a MIDI-capable hardware available either via the standard MPU-401 interface, or an RS-232 port, or an EMU8000 engine (as found on SoundBlaster 32/64 AWE series). Note, that some sound cards provide an MPU-401 interface natively, although many need an additional 'wavetable' daughterboard to produce actual MIDI sound. Since DOSMid v0.7 it is also possible to somewhat emulate MIDI via FM synthesis using an OPL chip (that is one of the Yamaha YM3812 or YMF262 chips, found on most sound cards from the nineties) - be warned however that, most of the time, such MIDI-over-OPL emulation will yeld less than desirable results, unless the MIDI file was specifically crafted for OPL.

Hardware requirements

Minimal requirements:
  - a compatible synthesizer (wavetable, OPL or external - see the compat list in program's documentation)
  - 8086 CPU (see DOSMid running on a 8086 here)
  - ca. 200K of available conventional memory (less if you have XMS)
  - a video card able to display an 80x25 monochrome text mode

Highly recommended:
  - 80286 CPU for a guaranteed lag-free experience even on complex MIDI files
  - VGA graphic with a color monitor
  - 512K of available XMS memory

License (BSD 2-clause)

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Download

DOSMid v0.9.8 (and source code)

You can get older DOSMid releases from the files area.