@scavy said in Hide Pre-Installed does not hide Ports:

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What is the link between parents making retroconsoles for young kids and preinstalled games ?

Apologies for just dropping into the conversation, but maybe this might help explain the link between parents making retroconsoles for young kids and preinstalled games. The implied concern here is that an impressionable child being exposed to the possibility of running games with things like mutilated corpses, demons, gore, etc. (i.e. Doom), when the preinstalled games reappear during an auto-update, without the parent's knowledge or consent, can be not only upsetting for the parent, but mentally damaging for the impressionable child.

One suggestion to the poster/parent would be to turn off the auto-update, and just plan on setting aside some time to re-hide the pre-installed games, when they manually do an update, periodically. Yeah, it's not as easy as set-it-and-forget-it, but then it's your responsibility to protect your children, and that requires you to be active, not passive. Alternatively, what would happen if the poster/parent just renamed the executable of another game they don't find objectionable, to doom.exe, and copied the game's entire contents over the existing doom game? Unless the RB update is doing something to verify the game files, and replace them, that should remove the chance a child could run Doom. If the parent then scraped the altered game, the images in the RB menu should then default to no-image, because it won't match the hash values stored in the games database.

The devs of RB are definitely doing a great job of building the software, and the community. That doesn't mean every decision they make is right, easy, or going to please everyone. The choice to include more mature content in every install is questionable, considering the target audience is from 1 to 100+ years old. Maybe the choice of which games are kept and repopulated, to prevent the looping bug, could be reviewed and or changed to something with a wider acceptable audience? If the answer is no, then people should respect that decision and do what they must to keep their children from encountering objectionable material; even if that means using a different piece of software.

@alvin Yes, I tried selecting the midi options in the game configuration, but similar to @chacs, I get no music sound. The digital speech and sound effects for the SoundBlaster work though.

Those results are what led me to do the research, and discover the mixer /listmidi command, which I tried and found out that DosBox does not list any midi devices. It is possible to do this by putting the following commands in the dosbox.bat file:

mixer /listmidi
pause

Since there are no midi devices available to DosBox, I have nothing available to enter in the midiconfig= line of the dosbox.cfg. I am wondering how do I get a midi device to be available in DosBox, and DosBox suggestions are to run a midi emulator like munt or fluidsynth.

So, is it possible to use a MIDI emulator with Recalbox, on a Raspberry Pi, that can be detected by DosBox?

Is it possible to use a MIDI emulator with Recalbox, on a Raspberry Pi, that can be detected by DosBox?

@chacs asked a related question in 2018, and noted, "Under Windows, DosBox goes through the 'midi drivers' of the PC sound card, but under Recalbox/Raspberry, I suppose it must be different."

@lmerckx responded with, "It's probably a DosBox compile-time option that hasn't been enabled. We should look into it sometime..."

I was hoping a solution had been implemented that would allow me to play some of my old non-scummvm games such as Wing Commander, X-Wing, etc. with their glorious MIDI music.

From my own research into the issue, it appears an emulator, such as munt, or fluidsynth, is needed. Once one of the emulators is running, and the necessary roms and a soundfont are provided, the MIDI device can be detected in DosBox, using the command mixer /listmidi to get the midiconfig= entry in the dosbox.cfg file for the game. Or at least that's how it's done with Windows and DosBox; I'm not sure how Recalbox would do it.

Does Recalbox already have a MIDI emulator running?
Has a DosBox compile-time option been found and enabled?
If so, is there a configuration option we need to enable, to make DosBox, running inside Recalbox, see it?