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GEMS was used in a number of MD Games and to my understanding it was used a great deal with early MD Games. However, I had heard that GEMS as a driver and system had a few issues but it was used widely as it was released by SEGA themselves and it was fairly easy for musicians to use. I know this is...

I finally figured out how to get Dosemu to pipe out parallel data. From what I can tell GEMS.EXE doesn't really do any kind of checking on the status of the Genesis at all (makes sense, it's one-directional). It just dumps data out for the GEMS driver to load. Lots of different operations in GEMS.EX...

I'm trying another approach: using a pipe from Dosemu to redirect parallel output to a file and then using a modified emulator (Dgen-SDL) to read that pipe when the EXT port is accessed. Modifying the emulator should be the easy part; I'm having more trouble figuring out how to get Dosemu to properl...

I go to bed and when I wake up, great news! I don't care about hardware now. Of course it is one of ways to find out how it works all together, but looking in hardware much harder for me :). You're right, knowing the hardware isn't as important as knowing how it works. In any point of code execution...

I don't know how to do it with DOSBox or if it can be done. Normal DOSBox doesn't have any kind of MIDI in or pipe/socket type structure. I do know there is a patch for DOSBox MIDI input, but I didn't try building it. I believe the newest version of the patch is on sourceforge. It may be part of an ...

A quick peek that the ROM is already showing it's not quite a "stock" GEMS. It has all the regular GEMS functions that I can cross reference to the 2.8 source, but other functions for what looks like parallel communication on the EXT port (as we'd expect), and references to variables/addresses in th...

I tried to check some things about GEMS.EXE, and I found it works glitchy in DOSBox. http://i.imgur.com/ASnbgsi.png It may be DOSBox glitching but I know you will also get a result similar to this if certain files are missing (I think EGAVGA.BGI, maybe part of a GUI library). The GEMS ROM is includ...

MIDI will never really die as long as there are electronic musicians and vintage synth enthusiasts out there. Like Minty said it's changed form a little--most MIDI these days is internal to a PC, or being sent over USB interfaces, but it's so widespread you'll never really be rid of it.

How did they make songs then? I don't think that there was devices that was able to record and playback 16 channels MIDI, to send it into PC with DOS. May be they was using TWO PC?) One for sequencer, and second with GEMS.EXE running? Likely. In the early to mid 90s they may have either been using ...

So you listening in Renoise, then feeding MIDI in GEMS.EXE channel by channel, after that, copy-paste patches from DefleMask: saving banks, and split them - to make song like directory? After that combining songs with my combiner? Or something like that? Not exactly that complex. Make song in Renoi...

OK, I see it now in sega2f.doc. I should be able to get it sorted out now.

Hi, I just added a bit to the post before: sorry, I had forgotten to tell you to set the Port 3's CTLR port - that specifies the Interrupt on Ext-Int and the Port's Directions. Naughty me... Forgive me for asking but what am I needing to do with it? I haven't done anything to initialize it other th...

On Exodus at least it appears that _outbyte just hangs waiting on that bit to change. The assembly in the disassembler looks like ... move.l #$A1001F,(a7) .loop: movea.l (a7),a0 moveq #0,d0 move.b (a0),d0 and.l #2,d0 beq.b .loop ... Other than the odd code choices (I have all optimizations off), thi...

Those volatile pointers are just local temporaries to hold the #define'd addresses, to cut down on casting & make sure that the compiled code doesn't try to use word or long addressing when dealing with the port. It's a style thing I picked up from SGDK and it's a little easier to read than just ref...

I'm not getting any output. I'm assuming there is no way I have wired this wrong. Should RX be wired to TX and vice versa? I'm not using your exact code Minty but my code duplicates it and running it through the MESS debugger, it looks "proper." For my serial in and out functions, I need to be waiti...