MIDI output with Hatari

[dressupgeekout]

Hey everyone, I mostly just wanted to share that I was able to successfully use Hatari on macOS to drive MIDI output. An emulated copy of Sweet 16 is able to talk to my MIDI keyboard!

There's been a bunch of work within the last month or so in Hatari with regards to MIDI, especially on systems that are not Linux. Less buggy and slightly easier to use. I fixed a crash myself in the process.

 

You can follow that discussion if you like: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=427386

 

 

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9 hours ago, dressupgeekout said:

There's been a bunch of work within the last month or so in Hatari with regards to MIDI, especially on systems that are not Linux. Less buggy and slightly easier to use. I fixed a crash myself in the process.

Good to know!   hatari MIDI could use work on Linux too.   Namely it should be able to use MIDI through ALSA natively and not require portmidi  or OSS compatibility modules installed.

[dressupgeekout]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Good to know!   hatari MIDI could use work on Linux too.   Namely it should be able to use MIDI through ALSA natively and not require portmidi  or OSS compatibility modules installed.

Hatari already does not require you to use PortMidi if you're on Linux. But you might have to build from source with the correct parameters in order to make that happen.

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34 minutes ago, dressupgeekout said:

Hatari already does not require you to use PortMidi if you're on Linux. But you might have to build from source with the correct parameters in order to make that happen.

Correct,  but if you don't then you have to load in the snd-virmidi kernel module, which requires elevated privileges.   This module creates the /dev/snd/midi* device files that hatari expects.

 

Most other MIDI software doesn't need this step,  including other emulators like DOSBOX.   They can send data straight through the ALSA api.

 

I did write a script to set this all up for hatari,  I just don't like the fact that it needs super-user access to load in that module for basically one app.   Also having the script figure out which midi device files map to your synth and feed that info to hatari was a bit tricky.

 

I just think it could be simpler based on how other emulators do it.