PrBoom /dev/sequencer Hangs, Music Issues

Over Christmas, I was debugging a problem on a friend's computer where PrBoom would hang randomely soon after starting. The problem seemed to be sound-related, as the game would often hang on MAP01 when dropping to the floor, picking up the chainsaw, or some other activity that would generate sound. I subsequently find that it's an issue that many people are seeing.


What exactly triggers the problem is not clear - it seemed to often run the demos okay, but fail fairly consistently when playing for real. But the actual problem, when it occurs, is clear enough. PrBoom gets stuck with the audio thread trying to open /dev/sequencer; and, for some reason, it is stuck in the kernel trying to get a handle to the MIDI sequencer device. Since most systems don't come with a MIDI synth chip these days, I suspect it's actually the ALSA sequencer emulation that is being invoked. I think it's ALSA, or the kernel, that is actually at fault.

Anyway, the problem is easily worked-around by either:

• Disabling music — run with -nomusic or set music_card to 0 in prboom.cfg (if you have PrBoom installed, you can do man prboom.cfg to get the documentation on the config file).
• Install Timidity and a patch set. If /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg is present, PrBoom (actually SDL_mixer) will use SDL_mixer's MIDI synth instead of looking for hardware MIDI.

On a related subject, I notice that the freepats patch set that comes with Debian these days gives a much poorer rendering of the Doom music than the old timidity-patches package. Apparently the older set had some unresolved copyright issues that resulted in it being dropped from Debian; but, for those willing to overlook that, you can still get the patches from mirrors of old distributions of Debian.

Update: Fraggle points out that the EAWPATS patch set is available from the idgames archive and is a big improvement on freepats.

EAWPATS is much closer to the old timidity-patches, but they are clearly distinguishable - the music for "The Pit" shows the difference most clearly, as EAWPATS has the melody line for the first half in what I think is a harpsichord tone, where timidity-patches does not (because it doesn't have a harpsichord patch, instead reusing one of the other piano types). Also the relative instrument volumes (which seems to be the biggest problem with rendering old MIDIs ‒ background instruments played too loud and drowning out the foreground ones) are different. EAWPATS seems better overall.