I'm not aware of a direct solution to your problem. Even finding a PCI card that supports MIDI out in DOS restricts you to a subset of those with DOS PCM drivers.

The Dreamblaster X2 board from Serdaco allows you to change sample sets via the USB interface. At present, the sets must be in a proprietary format, but conceivably a translator program could be created for SF2 banks. An external computer can also be used as a sample based synth (via FluidSynth, BassMIDI, the Roland VSTI plugin, the Yamaha VSTI plugin, etc) thus providing great flexibility in the sound of your MIDI tracks while costing some complexity.

These sound like fun options to explore. I was a bit apprehensive about investing in a Dreamblaster with the buggy DSP, and it would be really great to have a single machine solution.

But, it seems I may not be able to have everything I want 😀

The Dreamblaster X2 seems to have a really nice sample set. Also super fond of Roland and Yamaha. It might be a fun project to convert those to whatever proprietary format is needed. Been looking for a coding project...

The other option is to add ISA slots via a passive ISA backplane.

Just to clarify, is your current DOS computer the P4 board in your sig? If so, Vortex 2 based cards often feature a WB header and are very handy if you also want to run Win98. Some ESS PCI cards have the header which may or may not be populated, although I'm not completely clear on whether DOS MIDI support extended beyond the Solo-1 cards, nor are they particularly handy for Win98 gaming.

gdjacobs wrote:

Just to clarify, is your current DOS computer the P4 board in your sig? If so, Vortex 2 based cards often feature a WB header and are very handy if you also want to run Win98. Some ESS PCI cards have the header which may or may not be populated, although I'm not completely clear on whether DOS MIDI support extended beyond the Solo-1 cards, nor are they particularly handy for Win98 gaming.

Indeed, it is! I'll give one of those a try. Win98 isn't being run on this box- that's a project for another time.

Yeah, that'll give you unglitched MIDI at least. Or you can look at one of the options from the single sound card thread.