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MIDIBox: Munt + Roland Sound VA + SYXG50

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First post, by rkurbatov

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It's very hard now to get all types of external MIDI synths that were used for gaming and listening to the music. The major ones are Roland MT-32 family, Roland SC-55/88 family and Yamaha XG family. But seems like we have emulators for all of them. Munt covers MT-32, Roland VA is a perfect solution for SC family and Yamaha created software XG synths.

Seems like all of them are now available as VSTi synthesizers that can be enabled as default system synths. But I would like to have a separate device that I can connect to my retro builds via MIDI cable.

I'm thinking about something really small, like Intel NUC with USB to MIDI adapter attached. It's really tiny and 2-core Celeron on Windows 7 should be enough for both Munt and Yamaha as I understand, but I'm not sure about latest Roland solution.

Also, Roland VA requires x64 vst host while Munt and Yamaha are 32 bit solutions. And it would be really nice to have some programmatical solution to switch synthesizers without the need to attach the display.

Has anybody tried something like this? At least 'marrying' and switching between several types of synths with external input?

486: ECS UM486 VLB, 256kb cache, i486 DX2/66, 8MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440AGi VLB 1MB, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, FDD 3.5, ZIP 100 ATA
PII: Asus P2B, Pentium II 400MHz, 512MB RAM, Trident 9750 AGP 4MB, Voodoo2 SLI, MonsterSound MX300

Reply 2 of 2, by rkurbatov

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Trelokk wrote on 2022-02-12, 09:00:

The Munt VSTi is available in 32 and 64 bit.

Yeah, I found some information on that. Munt is available as VSTi, XG50 also has VSTi version, o I can use MIDILoop to create several ports and SAVIHost as a wrapper to connect dedicated port with dedicated synth.

There are two remaining problems. As I want my MIDIBox to be just a box, without display and keyboard, I need to find a way to switch the default MIDI Port via MIDI SysEx from my Retro PC. And then switch mode of my synth when I selected it.

Sound Canvas VA has special SysEx for using SC55/SC88/SC88Pro mapper
Munt for PI also had that functionality, so I can replace the ROM as I need to switch between old MT-32 / new MT-32 / LP-64 (there are three types of device), need to know if it's possible in VSTi
As for Yamaha I can just load several synths with different tables (if needed)

But switching of the MIDI port is questionnable. Technically, I can buy the touch display and write the wrapper to select the active synth on it but that's not the best approach.

486: ECS UM486 VLB, 256kb cache, i486 DX2/66, 8MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440AGi VLB 1MB, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, FDD 3.5, ZIP 100 ATA
PII: Asus P2B, Pentium II 400MHz, 512MB RAM, Trident 9750 AGP 4MB, Voodoo2 SLI, MonsterSound MX300

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