winmm/midi tests and VMware

[Paul Vriens]

On 03/03/2010 08:47 AM, Ben Klein wrote:
> On 3 March 2010 18:10, Paul Vriens<paul.vriens.wine at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 03/03/2010 01:30 AM, Ben Klein wrote:
>>>
>>> If I understand this correctly, Wine/the tests are correctly detecting
>>> an MPU-401 "hardware" synth device because the driver is loaded, but
>>> VMware doesn't emulate the hardware and ends up confusing Windows and
>>> hanging (presumably due to some I/O wait). I'd call this a bug in
>>> VMware.
>>
>> Well, one of my statements in the very first email was:
>>
>> "VMware Workstation officially only supports MIDI output via the synthesizer
>> device."
>
> Given that hardware connections to external synthesisers are, at least
> in the Linux-side context, considered "synthesisers", I'm not sure
> what you mean by this.
>

For the record, I'm running VMware Workstation 7.0.1 on Fedora 11/12 
with a bunch of Windows guests and I'm by far knowledgeable on this MIDI 
stuff.

I'm just repeating the user manual:

==
Sound support includes pulse code modulation (PCM) output and input. For 
example, you can play .wav files, MP3 audio, and Real Media audio. MIDI 
output from Windows guests is supported by the Windows software 
synthesizer. MIDI input is not supported, and no MIDI support is 
available for Linux guests.
==

As we found out, the issue is when we try to use the 'external' midi 
device on NT, W2K and XP. So when I open the Audio Control Panel on XP I 
see 2 MIDI devices listed under 'MIDI music playback. These are 
"Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth" and "Creative Sound Blaster MPU-401", 
it's the latter that has issues. On most systems (judging by 
test.winehq.org) there is only one device defined at that place.

There are no apparent issues with the external midi device on 
Win9x/WinMe, maybe because of a different driver/'soundcard'? (It looks 
like it uses the older Ensoniq driver)

On W2K3 and Vista+, VMware uses it's own driver (that doesn't include an 
external midi device btw).

-- 
Cheers,

Paul.