Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: Linux Doom music player, version 0.9
Message-ID: <3t34qd$nt@kruuna.helsinki.fi>
From: Mike Heasley <mike@Pandora.ST.HMC.Edu>
Date: 1 Jul 1995 12:34:05 +0300
Sender: wirzeniu@cc.helsinki.fi
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont CA
Keywords: linux voxware doom music midi
Approved: linux-announce@news.ornl.gov (Lars Wirzenius)

Announcing musserver 0.9


1. Introduction

	Musserver is a simple program that plays the music in Linux Doom.  It
is a companion to Id's sndserver (Doom's digitized sound player), hence the
name musserver.  If you have either version of Linux Doom (SVGA or X), you
may know that it does not include support for music.  A while back, someone
posted all of the music to registered Doom as midi files.  This allowed
people (such as myself) to use their favorite midi players to play the Doom
music while running Linux Doom.  This method was kludgy (to use a technical
term) at best, requiring one to restart the midi player whenever the song was
done or the level was completed.

I got tired of doing this and decided to write musserver to provide Linux
users with an easy way to play the Doom music while running Doom.  Musserver
takes care of most (but not all) of the hassle associated with the above
method.  It loops music while in a level, and changes the music upon
receiving a signal from kill(2).  X Doom users can setup their favorite
window managers to map these signals to the touch of a few keys.  SVGA Doom
users must still change virtual consoles and send the signals manually.
Details on this process come in section 4 of this README.


2.  System Requirements

	In order to use this version of musserver, you must have the
following:

	- A version of Linux capable of running Doom (late 1.1.x, 1.2.x, and
	  1.3.x should work.  I don't know about others)
	- A recent version of Voxware, the kernel's sound driver (2.9 works,
	  2.5 and earlier may work).  If you get digital sound in Doom, your
	  version of Voxware should be recent enough.
	- A general midi synth device (SB16 Midi, MPU-401, 6850 UART, etc) or
	  FM synth device (Adlib, OPL3, etc).  FM synth users should get
	  version 0.92 or later since it is the first to correctly load FM
	  patches.  It is only available at pandora.st.hmc.edu (see below).

I have recently read that FreeBSD has some sort of Linux emulator that runs
Linux Doom.  I know that Voxware has been ported to FreeBSD, so musserver may
be able to run on FreeBSD.  I would be very interested to know if it does.


6.  Obtaining musserver

	Musserver can by obtained via anonymous ftp from the following sites
and their mirrors:

Primary-site:   sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/games/doom/musserver.tgz
Alternate-site: ftp.cdrom.com /pub/idgames/idstuff/LINUX/musserver.tgz

The next official release (1.0) is likely to happen when most of the features
in section 5 (future enhancements) are implemented.  However, you can always
get the latest version from my personal machine, at:

                pandora.st.hmc.edu /pub/linux/musserver-xxx.tgz

where xxx is the version number.

Note: at the time of this writing (June 27, 1995) the latest version of
musserver is 0.92.  It includes new options, bug fixes, and significantly
improved FM synth support.  It is available ONLY at the pandora site.



If you like musserver, let me know!  I'd like to get an idea of how many people
actually use it.  Please email me with any questions, bug reports/fixes, or
comments.

	Michael Heasley
	mheasley@hmc.edu


--------------LSM entry----------------
Begin3
Title:          musserver
Version:        0.9
Entered-date:   Jun 22, 1995
Description:    Music server for Linux Doom.  Loops songs while in a level
                and allows the user to easily change the music upon
                completing a level.  Emulates as transparently as possible
                the music playing of the DOS version of Doom.
Keywords:       doom music voxware midi
Author:         mheasley@hmc.edu (Michael Heasley)
Maintained-by:  mheasley@hmc.edu (Michael Heasley)
Primary-site:   sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/games/doom
                24273 musserver.tgz
Alternate-site: ftp.cdrom.com /pub/idgames/idstuff/LINUX
Original-site:  
Platform:       Linux, Voxware, general midi device
Copying-policy: GPL
End

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