brostenen wrote:
Jealous. I had to make do with a peated beer - Big Belly Brewing's Aethelstan. Not bad, but no Glenfiddich 😉
Vintage PC-wise a very frustrating evening. I'm trying to get my MIDI-setup working correctly. I recently acquired an Edirol UM-550 patchbay, and I want to have my MT-32 and Roland (GM) digital piano as output and various retro PCs as inputs, so I can just click a few buttons to route any given signal to any synth.
Sounds simple, should be simple, but somehow all my DOS builds have decided not to do MIDI at the moment. I thought it might be the UM-550 doing something odd, but connecting the PCs directly to the MT-32 didn't do anything either. Finally I dug up my MusicQuest and tried that: worked flawlessly, both directly to the MT-32 as well as through the UM-550. So my patchbay setup is working fine, it's just all the regular cards messing up. Note that I tested with both vendor-supplied diag software and Civilization (1), neither of which need intelligent mode, so that's not the problem. No idea what is yet, I set all the other cards to the exact same IO 0x330 IRQ 2/9 as the MusicQuest (and removed the MusicQuest), but nope, nothing. The cards certainly aren't dead - all other functionality seems to work fine, and I've tested on a clean instal DOS 6.22 system, so no software conflict.
To at least get something positive out of the evening I put my Unicomp Model M USB back together. I'd removed all the key stems and keycaps and washed them, put the upper casing in the dishwasher and cleaned the bottom plate thoroughly, as it was filthy when I got it. Now it's sparkling clean. Must say I'm slightly underwhelmed by the keyboard - the keys do their clicky thing, but it feels flimsy compared to the old IBM model Ms and build quality is much lower: there are rough edges on the plastic all over the place and the casing really needs screws to stay together. Still, it beats some rubber-dome chicklet keyboard 😀
This weekend I intend to do the same to a 1989 IBM M, it's even dirtier, but built like a tank and works perfectly of course.