Gentlemen, we can rebuild him - yoga, soundfonts/soundcards/MIDI and cooking
Yoga this week was somewhat better than last week. It was mostly concentrating on the spine on Wednesday, and the moving bridge pose with twisting of the hips feels like your spine is being rebuilt (in a good way, mostly) from the bottom up. At the end of the lesson you feel like you've grown an inch! Thursday concentrated more on hip opening. I may need to do more stomach exercises though, as I found the exercise last week where you rest yourself on your elbows and low both legs slowly to be really rather tough on the stomach muscles..
Last night I decided to cook myself vegan chilli - the texture is fine, but it's a little bland. Any suggestions? Perhaps add fennel like I do when cooking vegan bolognese? (edit : oh yes, would help if I said I was using soya mince (flakes) wouldn't it?)
I have also been playing around with soundfonts. Partly because I was finding it difficult to get enthused about a v cheap copy of Deus Ex I got a while back (maybe I'll try again; it's supposed to be good) - so I decided to fire up my legacy games/emergency backup box and play Ultima Underworld 2 (an excellent game, although &deity; game interfaces have moved on!) . On this box I have an AWE32, for which support can be added to UW2, but some of the music is a bit crap.
However, salvation is at hand because the AWE32 has expansion slots for additional RAM in which to install soundfonts - basically banks of sampled instruments. Install an improved soundfont and your music automatically sounds better - theoretically.
First, I had the pain of trying to get it working under DOS. Getting the card and PnP working isn't so difficult; however installing soundfonts seems to require Windows 3.1/9x onwards (I did find one standalone midi player that supported soundfont installation). Long story cut short : it became clear that Windows was required, so I junked Enhanced DR-DOS and installed Windows 98 (eww.. still, only for games).
Next, it became abundantly clear both that soundfont size is not necessarily an indicator of quality, and that it's very difficult to compose a quality soundfont that integrates well without exposing weaknesses in some areas. This is why some soundfonts are dedicated to providing instruments for certain genres rather than running the full musical gamut. I settled on one which generally sounds excellent, but is rather weak with some brass instruments.
Of course, in the course of this I ended up running UW2 under Windows 98; this opens the option of installing a spare Soundblaster Live I have lying around and using a 32MB soundfont on it as that uses system RAM rather thon onboard 30pin SIMMs..
I also played around with Exult - a fantastic engine designed to play Ultima VII and Ultima VII part 2 - DOS games that originally ran under a very odd version of an unreal mode memory management and thus aren't Windows compatible. This solves the sound problem in a different way - whilst you can run the music through a built in soundcard/external MIDI box, it's also possible to download soundpacks of the sound sampled directly from supported soundcard. This works extremely well, and gives the game a whole new lease of life. I'm considering porting it to the Dreamcast and PalmOS - it already runs on the Sharp Zaurus and uses SDL - how difficult could it be?
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
syllopsium) wrote,
