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Created on: July 8, 1997
Special Thanks to Bierster without him I would have never found out about MIDAS.
Special Thanks to Christian Wiehl for the link to http://www.modarchive.com.


Useful Links: Hopefully I'll be able to add a whole lot more to this section before the end of this week. If you want you can search Microsoft's site for "MCI" or "Media Control Interface" and give it a try yourself.


Introduction:
    MIDAS Digital Audio System Home Page

    Originally Click & Create was supposed to have native support for the MOD format. Unfortunately as the deadline approached this feature was dropped in favor of adding more critical aspects of Click & Create. So if you wanted to use a MOD file to provide the music in your games you were pretty much out of luck. Well that may no longer be the case!

    Right now I'm in the progress of investigating three different ways that MOD files can be access from Click & Create. Information about all three methods can be found right below.

    The home page above has most of the information I have been able to find about most of the programs listed on this page so be sure to check it out yourself if there's something you need to find out.

Method 1:
    MIDAS Module Player

    The program above allows MOD files to be launch through command line parameters. I have tried this and it does work rather nicely. The one problem I see is that when the program is run it loads a Window of its own that will be above your application's Window. But I found this in the readme.txt.

    "MidpNT now also accepts a command line option. Yes, that's right, a single command line option. Pass MidpNT "-m" on the command line before the module file name to start in minimal UI mode."

    This helps some but still you have a tiny title bar to put up with. This is a 32-bit program that will, of course, only run on Windows 95 or Windows NT. The license allows for redistribution under some circumstances. I suppose it would be best to get permission first.

Method 2:
    MIDAS for Windows 1.03B

    The program above allows MOD files to be opened and played by using MCI commands. I believe this is the most practical option. If you can get it to work. You need to have a strong understanding of MCI to use this program. So far I haven't gotten it to do much of anything but give me error codes. But then again I haven't been working with it much. I'm trying to find a newer version. If you do locate a more recent copy will you PLEASE tell me? I would appreciate it greatly. This edition is from 1994 and I'm not very happy with it.

    Okay I suppose I should walk you through how to install it on Windows 95 since it doesn't have instructions for this. (How could it?) You go to the Windows 95 Taskbar, then Start Button, then Settings, then Control Panel, then Next, then No, then Sound, video and game controllers, then Have Disk..., then Browse to where the file oemsetup.inf is on your system. This is a file that is in the above wmidas13.zip file. Then OK, then Finish, then configure the driver, the default setting were fine for me. And should be for you too unless you have a Gravis Ultrasound, looks interesting. And now you will probably need to restart your machine.

    If you want to verify that this MCI device, or any other one, has been installed on your machine here's what you will need to do: go to the Windows 95 Taskbar, then Start Button, then Settings, then Control Panel, then Advanced, then Media Control Devices, then you should see a list of devices install on your system including [MCI] MIDAS Module Player 1.0. You can now hit Properties and then Settings... to reconfigure the software.

    I have gotten this to work with C&C using the standard MCI instructions I've listed below:
     

      close all
      open modplayer
      load modplayer filename.mod
      play modplayer
      stop modplayer
      close modplayer
    Since this program is out of date I recommend using older MOD files. They appear to work better.

    The most impressive thing about this application is that it could be used in a Vitalize! program to play MOD files online. The files would have to exist on the user's hard-drive unless there's something you know about MCI that I don't.
     

Method 3:
    MIDAS Digital Audio System Program

    The software above includes source code for making MOD file players that could conceivably be used to make an extension object for Click & Create. I certainly haven't had the time to look at this thoroughly but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done. This would be the most impressive way to access MOD files but can anyone do it? We have to wait and see.

Method 4:
    WinMod PRO

    I found out about this application on a Macromedia site. Director cannot directly access MOD files either. All you need to do to use this program is run the program as an external program and send it the command line parameter of the MOD file you want it to play. If you want it to stop playing just send the program the name of a nonexistent MOD file and it will stop playing if it can't find the file.

Method 5:
    The Windows 95 Start function

    Windows 95 has a function called Start. This function can be used to launch any program by is associated program. That means that if you wanted to to open filename.doc in MS Word then all you would have to do is type Start c:\filename.doc in the Windows 95 Run... dialog box and Windows would automatically open the file with whatever program *.doc files are associated with in this case MS Word.

    In Click & Create this can be done by using the Execute External Application and setting the following attributes:

    Program to Execute: start
    Command Line: c:\filename.doc

    You can use this to open almost any kind of file there is including Word files, MPEG's, MOD's, Help files, and so on. Imagine the possibilities. Good luck and have fun.


This page and all of its contents are Copyright 1997-98 by Christopher Jay Craft.