Back in 2010, when I released my HHeretic/HHexen for the first time (!), I had a dream: to be able to play those two games (and others: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, ...) while listening to their great MIDI soundtracks. I knew next to nothing how MIDI works, how MIDI synthesis works, I only knew there is something called Timidity and that it is slow.
So for all those years I'd wished that somebody would create "something" to move this further.
A few years ago I purchased the great mt32-pi (which ended its development in a rather sad way...) for listening to ScummVM games' music (which I wholeheartedly recommend!) but it took me another couple of years to connect the dots: many of those SDL ports still had support for MIDI and even better, they often did it in an uniform way, via SDL_mixer! So that was only a "small" step to actually implement a native Atari MIDI driver there, link everything together and voila. HHeretic and HHexen got their music (same as did PMDoom, PMHeretic and PMHexen, btw).
OpenTyrian, that was another story: just a quick port, never heard of that game in 2010, almost a "./configure && make" job, done. Over time there were newer ports by insane/.tSCc. and medmed on AF but always from the stale sdl1 branch (2020; EDIT: In the meantime my pull request has been accepted!). So I didn't feel the need to update my own port (unlike HHeretic/HHexen which got updated in 2024).
Until now - I managed to backport all non-SDL2 commits from master back to the sdl1 branch so we've got all the cool improvements and bugfixes. I even optimised audio playback a bit, so the OPL emulation is almost usable on 68060@66 MHz (FireBee should shine). And yes, I do know about NokturnFM project, everything at the right time. :)
Those who know me are aware that I don't care very much about making quick SDL ports just for the sake of releasing something. I can promise you that these three projects have been extensively tested and thanks to them SDL contains tens of bugfixes and improvements.
So enjoy, play test and feel free to report any bugs. Currently I'm not aware of any SDL issues, the executables should fully work in GEM (window/fullscreen) and XBIOS (fullscreen), on all Atari machines with >= 8bpp output.
Open Tyrian in action in a GEM window running FreeMiNT
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