I see there are two modern solutions to interface a Roland MT-32 to a computer without having to use the extra MPU-401 box. It's great, but I can't find a comparison between them, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and why choose one over the other?
Yeah I was wondering about that too. I would probably be able to dig through the forum and figure it out but haven't the time yet. My first guess is that HardMPU runds the SoftMPU app on separate hardware to lessen CPU usage but I could be wrong. It's still emulating intelligent mode. PCMIDI is real HW solution for it.
From a functional point of view, they're pretty much the same thing: 8-bit ISA cards that provide an MPU-401 interface with intelligent mode support. You can also achieve this with SoftMPU, but it needs to load a TSR that will obviously use some system resources and also requires EMM386, which makes it unsuitable on older machines.
The differences are on the hardware side: the PCMIDI is a reverse-engineered clone of the old Music Quest card (though the newer versions have some extra features, such as wavetable support), while the HardMPU basically runs a port of SoftMPU on a microcontroller.
HardMPU is ab0tj's port of SoftMPU onto an arduino microcontroller and interfaced to the ISA bus, which in use behaves just the same as a real MPU401 without needing additional drivers. In my experience it works well for intelligent MIDI output, but it's not a full MPU401 because it's primarily an output device, which for me is just fine. I built a couple of HardMPU cards for myself last year and I think they work really well.
It's open source so you can make your own card for non-commercial use potentially. That's a lot of work but I found it fun and quite educational. I don't think ab0tj has any cards up for sale right now though.
The PC-MIDI card is a re-production of a full MPU401 compatible card. MusicQuest made an MPU401 card and the PC-MIDI card is a reproduction of that, but with some slight improvements like wavetable header and simplified design. I haven't had a chance to try this but it's a more complete implementation with MIDI input and precise timing stuff. The PC-MIDI card's only available as a full product as far as I'm aware, but it was developed on this forum by keropi.
For playing games that use intelligent MIDI, both cards do the same thing 😀
Does SoftMPU (and by extension HardMPU) not support recording?
I know very little about this, but if PCMIDI is a direct replica of an old card, does it run into the issues of overflowing MT-32 etc when run on faster machines?
