nancygold's Journal

Finding the MIDPAK version used by the Stronghold

Digging the exact DIGPAK and MIDPAK version, I had to do some archeology...
From what I got, the MIDPAK and DIGPAK drivers were distributed as shareware
through BBS. The author asked $500 for each of them, for commercially use.
BBS were telnet servers, offering read/posting messages and downloading files.
The MIDPAK was a wrapper over the AIL library, which only allowed music.

BTW, some schizos insist on using SSH for BBS (Telent is insecure!!!):
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/which-to-use-telnet-or-ssh-for-logging-into-bulliten-board-systems-bbss.43829/

Apparently some people never paid $500, since README.PRN had the author
complaining. So yeah, having an audio your game was rather expensive.
The audio cards themselves could cost you $500 and more.
Nowadays we have it for almost free, unless you want something advanced,
like 3d or virtual reality stuff.

In any case, first I will have to work through the rest of STRONG.DAT
code, since I will need to extract the driver files to compare
their exact binaries with the available distributions.
Hopefully I wont need reversing all the int 66h stubs.
Would also be nice finding the sources for VGA library,
and the LBM package used. LBMs mean the graphics was likely made in
Deluxe Paint on Amiga. Or maybe with a DOS port, like Deluxe Paint II,
and DeluxePaint Animation, which are still considered warez:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140117052406/http://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=201

MIDPAK.TXT:
The MIDI driver MIDPAK hooks into user interrupt vector 66h to provide a
clean clear programmers interface. MIDPAK uses the same interupt vector
as DIGPAK. DIGPAK describes the complete set of Digitized sound drivers
provided by THE Audio Solution.

MIDPAK is fully compatible with DIGPAK. If your application needs to
play back both MIDI music and digitized sound you simply first load the
digitized sound driver you need, and then load the MIDPAK midi driver on
top of it. The MIDPAK driver detects the presence of the DIGPAK sound
driver and re-routes all calls through it. If the digitized sound
hardware does not support independent playback of digitized sound (DMA
support: SoundBlaster, and ProAudio Spectrum do.) then MIDI music
playback will shut down while the digitized sound effect is playing.
MIDI music playback will continue once the digitized sound effect has
completed. This is completely transparent to the running application.

MIDPAK uses the set of MIDI sound drivers developed by Miles Design
Incorporated. These drivers vary in size and can be noted by the
extension of .ADV. MIDPAK will always load the sound driver MUSIC.ADV
when started. The application should copy the apropriate sound driver
over as MUSIC.ADV before loading MIDPAK.

Current Mood: amused