I haven't heard of it, therefore a PCI adapter for MPU-401 is a nice idea for making it more compatible with newer hardware.

Or in the modern era, PCI Express as well.

A random comment from a random person years ago. File closed.

i guess there must have been a technical reason why noone ever made a PCI adapter card for the mpu-401

id imagine there might be a considerable amount of other differences between converting a design to a different architecture from ISA -> PCI

chrisNova777 wrote:

i guess there must have been a technical reason why noone ever made a PCI adapter card for the mpu-401

id imagine there might be a considerable amount of other differences between converting a design to a different architecture from ISA -> PCI

It's not trivial but can be done, so maybe there has just not been enough interest to do it before.
Most likely there was no need for this, as many games just used the dumb uart mode anyway to connect to external MIDI devices, and even PCI sound cards did have the same MPU-401 type of MIDI interface available in DOS.

You can buy PCI to ISA bridge chips so you could integrate the whole design to a PCI card.
And there are ready made industrial PCI-to-ISA bridge cards that have ISA slots so you can plug in existing legacy ISA cards.
Given enough knowledge, this could also be doable with suitable CPLD/FPGA on a PCI card (and writing a ton of HDL code).