I recently found some floppy disks containing lots of XMI's from various old games, including corresponding sample.ad (or similar) files. I still have an old DOS-based playback tool I wrote back then, which uses the Miles libraries to play these XMI files. However, since it's DOS based (and tied to a SoundBlaster card), it's not very convenient to get it to work on windows.
So I searched on the internet for a windows player for XMI files. I found out that winamp is supposed to play them, however, it only plays silence for most of them.
Then I found a tool called xmi2mid, which works somewhat, but the generated files sound very different from what the DOS player (and the games) play.
My question now is: Is there any program to properly playback these XMI files?
I'm thinking about using parts of Exult (and/or ScummVM) to write a standalone player which plays these files back exactly the same way they sounded back on DOS. The idea is to take for example Exult's XMI loading code and tie it to ScummVM's MT32 emu (or timidity, or any other MIDI emulator). I could use some help there, as I'm not a MIDI expert. Exult's source code seems cobbled up with magic tables that convert XMIs to GM/GS (which seems to be some kind of MIDI format) and other "magic" stuff which I don't actually understand.
Also, I don't know what the SAMPLE.AD files contain, but I guess they're needed for playback somehow? My first guess was that they contain the sample data which is played on each MIDI note, but they're only a few kb in size and thus can't contain complete sample banks. And, apart from that, AdLib cards couldn't do sampling anyway so they must serve some other purpose.
Help, anyone?
