So I recently came across a situation in which it became clear that I was going to be able to run either Windows XP or Linux FC2 on my old Dell Dimension workstation (it having been relegated to second PC status with my acquisition of a work-supplied Shuttle XPC 3.2GHz P4 a couple of months ago), but not both — I could not get FC2 to properly install a boot loader if Windows was installed first, and Windows wouldn’t install if FC2 was installed first.
I decided that one OS was enough, and settled on Fedora Core 2 (I actually began with Fedora Core 3, but backpedalled when it became clear that I would not be able to get any audio applications compiled and running under FC3, but that’s another story).
Then I remembered that I would not be able to run Recycle, MESA or Millenium to dump samples to my Akai S2000 with if I was running Linux (not that i really use the ole S2000 much anymore anyway, but it was the principle of the thing), and had a brief moment of panic before I decided I would give VMWare a whirl.
My friend Paul had mentioned to me recently that VMWare seemed to have exemplary device pass-through capabilities, so I thought to myself: “self, I wonder if I can get SCSI sample dump running under Windows XP while it’s running under VMWare emulation?”
I downloaded a demo copy of VMWare, and proceeded to install it, then Windows XP, then after a brief confusing period trying to get bridged networking mode working, got the network running under NAT and all seemed to be well.
I thought that it might be a good idea to get VMWare configured such that it’s audio output would work with artsd, which is the resident sound system server under KDE, and a flip of the google later, I found vmwaredsp and quickly had VMWare piping the Windows XP audio out to the artsd daemon.
Then, I wondered how I would get VMWare to recognize the Akai sampler as a valid SCSI device, so I probed /var/log/messages where I found that Linux was recognizing the sampler as a generic SCSI device at /dev/sg0. I then went through the VMWare config settings, and added a new generic SCSI hardware device to my Windows XP virtual machine at, where else, /dev/sg0. After a quick chmod to allow read and write access to all users for that device, I fired up my Windows XP virtual machine, and lo and behold, it came up in the “Found New Hardware Wizard” complete with accurate vendor string.
Realizing that while this was a good sign, it still meant absolutely nothing in terms of securing my goal, I proceeded to install the ASPI layer for Windows XP, and then Recycle 1.7, and rebooted.
With fingers crossed, I fired up Recycle and asked it to look for the S2000. It found the sampler! I then loaded up the Windows startup sound, chopped it, saved the MIDI file to the desktop, and arrived at the moment of truth:
Would it send to the sampler?
I clicked the lightning bolt icon and watched in amazement as it sent all 7 slices of the Windows startup sound to the S2000. It worked! How cool is that? Subsequent tests with MESA and Millenium cemented the conclusion. Windows XP run under VMWare absolutely supports SCSI sample dump to Akai samplers.
Not only that, VMWare is fast as hell. I benchmarked it with SiSoft Sandra, and found that as far as the CPU was concerned, Windows XP running under VMWare on my 1.2GHz Celeron Tualatin was about as fast as a 1GHz P3. Not too shabby.