Hi! It's been truly great experiencing MIDI sound again and learning the ins and outs of it after being away from it since oh around 1990 or so.... I've enjoyed the sound of a few different soundcards in my retro PCs and a few of the wavetables from Serdaco as well, but today I wanted to note something on a USB MIDI keyboard I have, the Yamaha PSR-K1 entertainment machine. Forgive if it's captain obvious type stuff.

I like to listen to MIDI compositions on my Win98-PIII-1.1ghz machine. The sound card is a Terratec Base 1 with, at the moment, Serdas S2 card on it. I'll say this - the Terratec's FM synthesis is early 80's game level sound at best. Great for those early games, but on this system kind of wasted. But I also have the keyboard connected to it via USB (Yamaha STILL has Win9x drivers for these keyboards on its site, which is pretty awesome). I use Midiplayer 5 for it and it has a sysex setting where you can attach the various protocols - GS, GM, XG, NX (the last of which I'm not familiar with) to the stream if the file doesn't show its encoded in one of these already.

The keyboard generally sounds awesome for retro gaming. But I've found that it reacts oddly to this encoding, at least where XG is concerned, which you think it would handle easily. Check out this midi file of good old Duke Nukem 3D's Theme:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/yqge0vdxzr0gwe … c4d4no8ks4&dl=0

Rather missing something, eh? Contrast with the same file played with GS (GM is similar but GS sounds a bit better):

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nvpco4rt08mwza … s8cx1l8bxb&dl=0

Of course, in the Internet tradition of 'Why not both?' I mixed them together in Audacity:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5k15c739zdmqz4 … mj1d6er889&dl=0

As I said, probably stuff everyone else knows that's just new to me, but I enjoy learning it and exploring the sounds and what is possible. I actually have a Casio on the way that I am looking forward to comparing, as well as a couple of wavetables. The S2, by the way, is nearly as good sounding as the keyboard. There are also only subtle differences tween XG, GS, and GM, hard to hear unless you're really listening for them. If anyone's interested in the same MIDI file played on it, let me know, I did the same tests with that one too.

EDIT: Makes no sense to talk about the S2 results and not share them right off. Here's the results right off my system. It comes off my system as mono:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zdsddh6u5dwbmg … zqnotk9u3s&dl=0

Since the Keyboard outputs in stereo, I thought I'd level the playing field a bit and run the S2 results through a quick stereo enhancement (in other words, I cheated a bit).
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7988pzgxwxay8j … kcc50uk01s&dl=0

I'm really impressed with the S2's output.