https://www.blaizenterprises.com/cynthia.html#help--what-mak...

It’s pretty consistent these days that when some indie / hobby app appears and is lightweight, there’s a very decent chance it’s Delphi, Free Pascal, or similar. A bit of a secret weapon in the Electron age.

Have tried the modern community edition of Embarcadero Delphi a couple of times over the years, but found its layers on layers of source code and object inheritance complexity really shocking. I can only imagine the poor souls that have to maintain that mess.

Something like trying to ascertain simple logic pathways through their code in order to understand function limits or compatibility issues was a real nightmare/time consuming. Let alone attempting to predict or change core functionality.

And they did away with 8 bit ANSI strings, which were at times rather handy for some basic IO work and data processing. More than anything, you knew were you stood in your data at all times.

Another annoying thing was there bitmap handler, which required you to lock it in order to access it's internal pixels for data processing - think this was for compatibility with mobile chips - which from my basic observations did a full read and write (copy) of the image data - slowish. A simple binary data handler to mimic a system bitmap got right round that bottleneck.

a) 3 Mb OPL3.zip (contains one file "OPL3.SF2") - compact but pretty good: https://www.vogons.org/download/file.php?id=45715

and was sourced from: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59354

b) 128 MB OPL-3_FM_128M.zip (contains one file "OPL-3_FM_128M.sf2") - a bit larger but slightly better in my opinion: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/15/OPL-3_FM_128M.zip

and was sourced from: https://midis.fandom.com/wiki/OPL-3_FM_128M.sf2_(OPL3_Yamaha...

You can direct Cynthia to output her midi notes/instructions to a different midi device/devices for higher quality playback/sound reproduction through the midi driver apps below (for Windows):

a) VirtualMIDISynth (supports up to 4 simultaneous drivers with option to use one or more different soundfonts per driver): https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

b) OmniMIDI: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/keppys_synthesizer....

The apps above do a nice job at playback with minimal lag and without much setup or tweaking to get going. Basically just install one, assign a soundfont, and restart Cynthia to be able to select a different midi device - numbered 1 to 10 under Playback Device (bottom right panel of main GUI).

At one point in the past I did look into including soundfont support directly into Cynthia, but instead decided to focus on playback stability and ease-of-use as top priorities, which funnily enough was a mountain enough all-by-itself to climb considering how difficult Windows can be to get along with, let alone get working right on something as simple as midi playback under Win32.

The app can also switch between up to 10 midi devices in realtime, or use them all simultaneously for playback - see main GUI, bottom right, Playback Device, 1 to 10 or "A" for all.

App supports General Midi 1 (GM1) over 16 channels in playback formats 0 and 1, but not 2. It does not support General Midi 2 (GM2) e.g. 32 channels, and does not support "system exclusive messages".