Playing midi music through sdl_mixer

I have been working on a old game (10 years old), and I’ve
gotten sound effects going, just not music, I am using the
latest versions of both sdl & sdl_mixer, I have also tried
older versions. This game was originally designed to run
under pure dos or a windows operating system that
supported that. I have done numerous searches on
internet about this type of problem, and I found a reference
that suggested that sdl_mixer will not play midi songs
under unix, this game is being compiled under cygwin
gcc 3.4.0 which I believe is a unix’ish system – even
though the cygwin shell is running on windows. If my
information is correct, then is there a version of sdl_mixer
that I can compile/link to that will play midi music under
a unix’ish compiled executable?

Thanks!
Jonathan Bailey

I have been working on a old game (10 years old), and I’ve
gotten sound effects going, just not music, I am using the
latest versions of both sdl & sdl_mixer, I have also tried
older versions. This game was originally designed to run
under pure dos or a windows operating system that
supported that. I have done numerous searches on
internet about this type of problem, and I found a reference
that suggested that sdl_mixer will not play midi songs
under unix, this game is being compiled under cygwin
gcc 3.4.0 which I believe is a unix’ish system – even
though the cygwin shell is running on windows.

SDL_mixer supports MIDI under windows both using the native MIDI output
and an LGPL’d version of Timidity.

From the SDL_mixer webpage:
Mixer supports playing MIDI format files using software wavetable via an old version of timidity. This requires you to have a GUS compatible set of sound patches on your system. By default, the library looks for these patches on Win32 in C:\timidity, and on UNIX in /usr/local/lib/timidity/.

See ya,
-Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment