Miles Sound

[Ellington Walford]

Milesfeatures a no-compromise toolset that integrates high-level sound authoring with 2D and 3D digital audio, featuringstreaming, environmental and convolution reverb, multistage DSP filtering, and multichannelmixing, and highly-optimized audio decoders (MP3, Ogg and Bink Audio).

Game Developer Magazine inducted the Miles Sound System into its Front Line Hall ofFame the very first year - the first middleware package ever to receive that honor.Over the years, Dan Thompson, John Miles, and Jeff Roberts have designed and refined the Miles APIto be the best possible solution for your game's audio needs.

You should check out what ourcustomers think, or if you are looking for something specific you can check out the Miles versionhistory. A breakdown of the Miles high level toolset, Miles Studio, can be found here.

Miles Sound System (MSS), formerly known as Audio Interface Library (AIL), is a sound software system primarily for video games and used mostly as an alternative for low-end audio chipsets. It uses little CPU time while providing adequate audio output. It was originally a middleware driver library for soundcards to use in DOS applications when no viable alternative was available. Epic Games Tools (formerly RAD Game Tools) acquired the technology from Miles Design in 1995.

The 1992 AIL version 2 for DOS has been released by John Miles as open-source (public domain without restrictions) in 2000.[2][3] The package can be found on his personal site (KE5FX.com) and contains source code for both real-mode and protected-mode programs.

The Miles Sound System was used in its history by over 7,000 video games across 18 platforms.[4] Computer Gaming World stated in 1994 that "Many of the game publishers have decided to support only those sound cards which are supported by the Miles drivers", especially the Sound Blaster.[5]

People who own a Creative/Ensoniq Soundblaster with Legacy device might

try this trick to make more games recognize their "virtual sb16"

hope I made somebody happy by sharing this, it sure works for me.

I guess the best Miles Drivers for Real/Protected mode games would be the latest real mode game with Miles Drivers and the latest Protected mode game with Miles Drivers since the latest vers have the latest bug fixes. So....anyone that cares run through your own DOS games and gather your own Miles drivers and we'll compare.

My guess is that the RAD Game Tools people won't have a problem with it. It would be good to ask, but then they'd probably have to say "no" because their lawyers will be overprotective. We could just put them up and then take them back down if we receive a warning. I guess that's ultimately Snover's call (unless they're hosted elsewhere).

The DIGPACK/MIDPACK drivers are a mess. No way to determine file versions except by looking at the header and seeing "1991" or "1991/1992" and looking at date-time stamp. Unfortunately date-time stamp isn't very reliable. So I have absolutely no way of determining which drivers are the latest drivers except to sort by game release date.....even then that's just me assuming that the person releasing the game actually used the latest DIG/MID drivers at release......

As for the .DIG files that go with protected mode games this was much easier. Looks like the latest version I have is 4.0d which comes with RedGuard. Looking at the Miles history page at Rad Game Tools it looks like they continued developing the DOS version for quite some time in their SDK. Don't know if anyone has compiled binaries of the latest versions. So if anyone has a version newer than 4.0d let me know, otherwise 4.0d will be the one posted to the site.

I should mention that with RAD's Windows DLLs (don't know if it applies to their DOS stuff), you can usually only interchange DLLs that have the same major and minor version numbers. That is, versions 1.0a through 1.0z are typically interchangeable, while 1.0z and 1.1a are not. It never hurts to try, but they seem to be pretty consistent about it in my experience.

Well I've collected every single .ADV file along with the programs to activate them....and there are a TON of different drivers for each sound card (For instance there are like 6 different .adv files for PC Speaker for some odd reason). Haven't actually gotten around to testing them yet.

Select this driver if you do not own any third party audio device and wish to hear sound effects out of your PC internal speaker. This driver is a foreground only driver and thus causes the machine to stop while playing a sound effect. You may want to select the NOSOUND sound driver instead.

I haven't tried to update rad windows dll's myself, I fear they might have changed the "interface calls" for the sound routines. Though the idea of getting better features by just updating certain common files is nice.

I just downloaded the demo of redguard.

Suprises me to see they added a windows setsound utility.

Indeed it is version 4.0d now, though the soundblaster normal/pro/16

dig files are exactly the same amount of bytes as the 3.50E files.

That doesn't suprise me, as Bethesda was coding DOS Glide games when everyone else had transitioned to Windows (I guess being a small developer it took a while to train their coders to write OpenGL/Direct3D). I never played Redguard because I went straight from a 120MHz 486 (running DOS 7 and Win95) to a 450MHz Pentium II with an AGP nVidia Riva TNT video card (which didn't support Glide).

"As for the .DIG files that go with protected mode games this was much easier. Looks like the latest version I have is 4.0d which comes with RedGuard. Looking at the Miles history page at Rad Game Tools it looks like they continued developing the DOS version for quite some time in their SDK. Don't know if anyone has compiled binaries of the latest versions. So if anyone has a version newer than 4.0d let me know, otherwise 4.0d will be the one posted to the site."

Here is some information on the Miles "Protected-mode" AIL v3 DOS audio drivers which may help in your quest to get the last released versions identified. The time/date and size of the Miles Audio AIL v3 file may help, but internally there are usually text strings in the MDI files which usually have an AIL33xx string embedded within the file. There is also an internal embedded version number located at byte position 0x8 and 0x9 (zero-based start) of both the DIG and MDI files.

Here is an example of the Gravis Ultrasound Miles AIL3 version 3.11 release originally dated 03-25-1995. Note that the internal version is 1.12 while the external release version was 3.11 - a bit strange. I believe that once the protected mode AIL3 drivers were released that the external numbers were always 3.xx - but someone made a mistake when these Gravis Ultrasound were labeled 3.11. Probably should have been 3.12 instead. Who knows at this point?

I have read on some now defunct forums that there was a set of unreleased Gravis Ultrasound AIL v3 drivers (supposedly v3.15) which actually worked and were stable on both actual Gravis Ultrasound ISA cards and Gravis Ultrasound software emulators such as the one built into DOSBOX and the Win32 GUSemu.

There is another advantage to your search for the latest Miles audio drivers - if you get the latest SoundBlaster versions for MDI: (SBLASTER, SBPRO1, SBPRO2, SBAWE32) and DIG: (SBLASTER, SBPRO, SB16) they will all read configuration information from the DOS "BLASTER=" environmental variable. This means that no need to change configuration files or to use the Miles SETSOUND.EXE utility in many cases for games run under DOSBOX.

Hey Thanks! My Miles/Smack/Bink Project folder keeps getting bigger and bigger (add new files every time I test a game).......I'm thinking about just releasing what I've got and then releasing periodic updates.

Thanks for the hard to find info "dvwjr"!

Did some searching some weeks ago, found some new/other driver files, but nothing really better than the ones I already packaged IIRC,

Dosfreak, If you have something interesting to add to the package please share it with me. (email: gbroers quicknet nl )

The game uses the old style miles drivers, but these are packed in a LBX archive: SNDDRV.LBX. I could not find a working tool to pack later drivers back into the archive. One LBXtool by wervdon from 2003 was malfunctioning, but came with the source.

Note that for some unknown reason Miles Sound System of 4/5/6 versions contain obsolete SBAWE32.MDI (without soundfont support). One with such support can be found in Magic Carpet 2: Netherworlds or Dungeon Keeper. It has a filesize of 36880.

I tried to solve an issue with Jagged Alliance Deadly games using these drivers, but I am not quite sure, whether handling was correct. However as DosFreak specifically mentioned Deadly Games I guess it should work.

So I tried to fix either one of them using the drivers here. For that I used the "newest" of the initial post. And I used the update_pc_miles_sounddrv5.rar by mefistotelis

I copied these into the game directory of both setups (using the one of the initial for the DOS Setup and the other one for the windows setup)

But the issue is, that the new setsound.exe does not update the sound.cfg of the game. So when I start the game, it will still use whatever was saved there. I guess it will use the other new files now. But unfortunately it makes no difference in how it sounds. That is true for both setups.

You got any suggestion here on what I did wrong?

I started playing guitar when I was 14. I saw my father produce and play a lot of music when I was young, and I wanted to be talented like him. I was always interested in learning every aspect of music. From the writing process, to recording and mix/mastering. I started recording my own music while I was in college at 18.

My sound is typically whatever I am feeling at the time. I may make a 30 second soft guitar song one day, and a 4 minute solo piano song the next, and a boombap song after that. I am still finding my sound. I love musicians whose work is an extension of themselves. Musicians that push boundaries, and are not afraid to sound different or try something new inspire me. I take inspiration from artists around the world that play different styles of music. Some of my favorite artists include Elephant Gym, Totorro, Santana, and several composers that create scores for movies and video games. Listening to my record collection always inspires me to stay active.

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