It came with Windows 3.1 drivers if that helps? I know 3.1 is DOS but what about pure dos without 3.1 installed?

AFAIR this mpu is 100% roland compatible, I have no idea about the plastic thing you mention though

Awesome! I picked it up for 25 bucks so I think that is not too bad.

Okay, I got it installed and got Firehawk along with Nova 9 to work perfectly with the card on my Gen 0 MT-32... not without a struggle though... and am having other problems. Ultima Underworld worked great first try, it is worth mentioning. Zeliard also works but my volume gets reset on the MT-32 when I change areas, odd.

My specs:

MS-DOS 6.22
Pentium 200
64 Megs RAM
S3 Trio 64 graphics chipset (this works fine with everything I throw at it)
AWE 32 PnP CT3600 (midi port set to p300)
Music Quest PC Midi Card II (was on IRQ 2/9, now on 7, p330 address)
Gen 0 Roland MT-32
Roland SC-55

I was getting Exc Checksum Errors left and right until I disabled my cache in the bios. They went away after that and finally Firehawk and Nova 9 would load custom instruments. They work great now.

Now, onto the puzzling, unsolvable so far problems:

ALL SCI 0 Sierra Games (i.e. Space Quest 3, Kings Quest 4, Police Quest 2 etc.) will not work when I select MT-32 as the sound device. They just won't load up. I start the games and I get my mouse cursor on the screen and then it just stops--I have to reboot (cursor moves the whole time though) and NO MIDI Message light activity on the MT-32. It remains blank. They don't even attempt to send a message. I don't get it. Changing the IRQ doesn't fix it, cache doesn't fix it... no luck. Funny thing is, if I select ADLIB, they work fine.

Kings Quest 5 works fine. Space Quest 4 puts "Calling Roger Wilco" on the MT-32 display then says "Unable to initialize music hardware."... This is when I do the MT-32/SB combo... when I select just MT-32, it works fine. Go figure. When I select just SB--unable to init music hardware... strange.

Might and Magic 4/5 (Worlds of Xeen CD Millineum version w/full speech and original dos version)... This one makes NO SENSE at all. I configure it to use Sound Canvas/GS (my SC-55) and it pauses at the title screen for a long time whenever the SC-55 is supposed to play a note or sound. The SB Audio works fine, though. I even disabled the SB audio so no speech device and tried the SC-55 alone... still pausing. I even hooked the SC-55 up prior to putting the Music Quest card in and it did the same thing. It is as if Xeen is ignoring my separate midi card completely. An IRQ change from 2/9 to 7 didn't do anything to help this. Xeen gives no method to select the device port either. It is worth noting the only way I've ever been able to get Xeen to use my SC-55 is on my main PC's X-Fi midi port inside of Dosbox. I'm clueless as to this. When I set Xeen to LAPC1/MT-32... it never shows the dragon, it just goes to a blank screen. ??????

Even weirder... System Shock works FLAWLESSLY with my SC-55/Music Quest card and even auto detects the 330h address for it(though I have no set variables in resident memory for it)... Same with Lost Vikings, it is perfect on the SC-55. So Xeen working makes no sense at all.

Silpheed--just chokes after the copy protect with MT-32 selected and never sends a message to the MT-32.

The thing that is puzzling me is why on earth would Xeen puke on standard midi mode? The other thing is don't Firehawk and Nova 9 use Intelligent Mode? I'd think they do? What Sierra/Dynamix games do and don't?

What kind of problems would I experience if the card doesn't support Intelligent mode?

Mr_Blastman wrote:

What kind of problems would I experience if the card doesn't support Intelligent mode?

Some of those you've already experienced, unfortunately. Sierra's SCI0 MT-32 driver requires an MPU acknowledgement that most non-intelligent cards do not provide (aside from some devices, such as Ensoniq cards, the Yamaha SW20-PC, and the AudioTrix Pro). Without this acknowledgement, the games will "hang" exactly as you've described.

Sierra's SCI1 and later MT-32 drivers, on the other hand, don't have the intelligent-mode requirement, and ought to work with any card providing basic MPU-401 UART-mode compatibility (SB16, etc.).

Unless there is some sort of utility to enable intelligent-mode support, I have to assume that the PC MIDI Card (II) is only MPU-401 UART-mode compatible.

Sometimes, reading the manual is the easiest solution. It said clearly inside it that it does not support Intelligent mode. So, the quest continues!

so I was wrong to assure to it was, sorry...

Could you provide a photo of the card? I know that when I had a Music Quest MIDI card back in the day and do not recall any issues with games requiring Intelligent MIDI support. However, you may have a different card than I had, but mine did have a dongle.