I have a couple of these LPT interfaces (a midiman and an egosys) and they only work under windows. They are designed to be used with music programs, once the driver is installed you just select the midi in/out ports in the programs. They are pretty much useless for dos/gaming AFAIK. SoftMPU supports serial connection though, so with a serial-.midi cable you should be able to use a module.

Hmm... my parallel-port equipped laptop (Thinkpad 365) actually has Win95. Could I use the MIDI interface from a DOS prog under Windows?

I didn't know softMPU supported the serial port, thats's pretty awesome actually. Will try it out and see how it works. How does it handle the baud rate incompatibility?

^ no idea to both questions, haven't tested either... 🤣

The MOTU doesn't work with DOS via the parallel port. However, you can still use a different interface that is compatible with DOS and then route the signal to multiple devices using the MOTU.

xjas wrote:

I didn't know softMPU supported the serial port, thats's pretty awesome actually. Will try it out and see how it works. How does it handle the baud rate incompatibility?

It doesn't, so you would need to use a module that supports serial input (various Roland/Yamaha/Korg), some other serial->midi converter, or a serial port that's been hacked to output MIDI baud rate.

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3qCIe0TmtQ

^^ Hmm, I have a JV-1010 with a serial port & MIDI through, but I want to pass a clock signal from a sequencer, not just note data. Not sure if the Roland supports MIDI clock from the serial input.

I also have an Opcode MIDI Translator II for the RS422 port on a 68k Mac, but it supplies its own 31250 bps clock *to* the serial port (not sure if this is a standard 422 trick or just a Mac thing.) I don't suppose I could stuff an RS422 PCMCIA card with DOS drivers in my Thinkpad and get this to work?

Never understood why using the parallel port for MIDI wasn't more popular. Sure you have to drive it in software but overcoming the baud rate headache & the ability to run multiple ports at once seems like it would be more than worth it. Then again MIDI has been around since 1983, the fact that PC UARTs that came around years later (16550 etc) never supported its baud rate is beyond stupid.

It is not stupid at all. There was no need for it. MPU-401 was the established standard by the mid 1980s and survived for about two decades. MIDI has been replaced by sampling. There is no need for hardware wavetables anymore as HDD/RAM space and CPU power became so cheap.

PeterLI wrote:

MIDI has been replaced by sampling. There is no need for hardware wavetables anymore as HDD/RAM space and CPU power became so cheap.

Okay, I suspect you're saying "using general MIDI files as game soundtracks was replaced by pre-recorded/rendered audio" here, but that's really not what MIDI (& 'sampling') means. Playing game soundtracks isn't what I'm after. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate a DOS-era laptop into a music production setup so I'm not dependant on having a big '90s tower full of near-unobtainable ISA cards any more.

To clarify my earlier statement - I'm still baffled as to why whoever developed the PC 16550 UART implementation didn't allow for the baud rate of a major serial protocol that had been around for years already and was used worldwide. Amiga & Mac serial ports can run at 31250 just fine, and Atari had MIDI built in.

If you wanna use the Serial port to communicate with MPU-401 hardware, one thing you can do is to get an Arduino Mega (or design a board around an AVR yourself) and the RS232 shield/adapter/whatever. The make a simple sketch "bridging" the serial port assigned to the RS232 interface and another serial port you can route to a DIN6 connector (the AVR does support the correct baud rate).

I have a Music Quest 8Port/SE and it includes a Cakewalk driver for DOS:

This diskette includes a driver, 8PORTSE.DRV, for Twelve Tone Systems'
Cakewalk and Cakewalk Pro for DOS, versions 4.0 and later. (The Windows
driver supports Cakewalk Pro for Windows and all other Windows MIDI
programs).

Doesn't Cakewalk allow for serial output?
Or go for a PCMCIA MIDI card maybe, but finding one can be tricky...

Roland SCP-55 , Yamaha PCC10XG and other PCMCIA cards are the better solution IMO.

PCMCIA Sound Cards

MIDI ISA cards are commonly available.