Performa 6116 - Apple Dos Compatibility Card - Roland MT-32

[Dimitris1980]

I am thinking of getting an apple dos compatibility card for my performa 6116 for dos games. I would like to ask if there is possibility to connect a roland mt32 device for the music.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The answer is a big "maybe". Apple's own pinout doesn't show the game port outputting MIDI signals, but that doesn't mean its true. If you have the card, I would do testing with a multimeter and see if +5V is present on pin 15 of the game port. If so, I wouldn't connect any MIDI device to the machine as that is supposed to be the MIDI-IN pin!

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA31667?viewlocale=en_US

 

[NJRoadfan]

I can confirm that the card does NOT support MIDI I/O on the Game Port. +5V is present on pin 15 so do not attempt to connect any MIDI devices.

 

[Bunsen]

Interesting... can programs running on the DOS card/s access a Mac serial MIDI converter?

 

[Dimitris1980]

So i guess for dos games with roland mt it is better a real pc or dosbox.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Interesting... can programs running on the DOS card/s access a Mac serial MIDI converter?

Not possible. The defacto standard for external MIDI port communication on a DOS machine is a UART located at 300h or 330h that is register compatible with the Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface. Its silly that the joystick port doesn't support MIDI. The Creative Labs VIBRA chip set used for sound on the DOS card has all the necessary functionality built into it.

 

[Bunsen]

Well, yeah. What I'm asking is whether PC Setup is smart enough to capture that and re-route it to the Mac side.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Necro Post!

This MIDI to serial converter for DOS looks promising: http://bjt42.github.io/softmpu/

And a video of it in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qCIe0TmtQ&feature=youtu.be

I haven't taken much time to look at how it works but the limitation @NJRoadfan talked about back in 2013 seems (no Midi expert here) to be easily bypassable now don't you think?

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Additionally, I just remembered while casually browsing for a MIDI Synth that the SC-55 MkII can be used over serial directly, therefore bypassing the MPU-401 interface altogether. 

The best part is that it uses a Mini DIN 8, so any straight through Apple serial cable can be used with the SoundCanevas without any modification necessary.

As @Bunsen pointed out, it should be possible to redirect that serial interface to the PC part without any visible issue, right?

 

[NJRoadfan]

A few notes. There is no guarantee that the serial port emulation from the DOS card to Mac side will work at all, there may be timing issues with MIDI devices. SoftMPU only works with non-protected mode games since it uses the 486's MMU to port trap writes to an emulated MPU-401 and redirect them. Anything protected mode needs modification directly (very few games can be configured to use a MIDI device on a serial COM port).

 

[nglevin]

Whether this is relevant for the Houdini, I recall for the SoundCanvases and their derivatives, the mini DIN pin outs for the PC and Mac cables were different between each other. As said above, Mac one is indeed a standard beige Mac-compatible serial cable.

QuickTime 2(.1?) and OMS do a fantastic job of allowing for re-routing an active MIDI device to anything that talks QuickTime. It's up to the capabilities of the Houdini software if Apple allows for something like that, which might be a stretch.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Thanks for your input!

very few games can be configured to use a MIDI device on a serial COM port

So using a MkII and serial might not be the best idea after all. So SoftMPU might work better, if it can be used at all on a 66MHz 486...

SoftMPU only works with non-protected mode games

Are there a lot of these? I'm new to DOS in general. The first computer I got to use ran Windows 9x and I never played any DOS games out of DOSBox.

Edit: Well, it seems there are quite a few. Welp.

the mini DIN pin outs for the PC and Mac cables were different between each other.

I'll have to investigate that!