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.

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.

Minimum requirements:

•  a compatible synthesizer (wavetable, OPL or external - see the compat list)
•  an 8086-compatible CPU
•  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

*** USAGE ***

During runtime, DOSMid can be controlled with the keyboard:

 ESC       Quits to DOS

 +/-       Volume up/down

 PAUSE     Pause the song (press any key to resume)

 ENTER     Skip to next song

 

At the command-line, DOSMid accepts several options, as listed below:

 

DOSMID [options] file.mid (or m3u playlist)

 

 /noxms    Use conventional memory instead of XMS. This is obviously useful

           only if you don't have XMS. Don't use this option otherwise, since

           without XMS you won't be able to load MIDI files bigger than a few

           dozen KiBs.

 /xmsdelay Wait 2ms before each XMS access. Such waiting is required sometimes

           when the MPU controller is emulated by a TSR driver (specifically,

           the AWEUTIL driver used with SoundBlaster AWE 32/64 cards happens

           to crash if XMS accesses are not slightly delayed).

 /mpu=XXX  Force dosmid to use MPU-401 on port XXX. If not forced, DOSMID

           scans the BLASTER environment variable for the MPU port, and if not

           found, it fallbacks to port 330h. The port part is optional, that

           means you can use "/mpu" to just force MPU usage.

 /awe=XXX  Use the EMU8000 synth chip found on SoundBlaster AWE32/AWE64 cards

           on port XXX (the port is optional, you can specify just "/awe").