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Miracle Piano System is surprisingly "simple"

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First post, by Sgeo

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I had the Miracle Piano System when I was a kid. I don't think I ever hooked it up to my computer, but I remember liking the visual of the rooms (I am way too easily amused).

The DOS version supports serial and (if seeing the string in the binary is to be believe) MPU401, but it kept freezing when I tried the latter.

I wondered if studying the schematics could reveal a way to translate between MIDI and whatever that Miracle port serial port thing is.

I also tried outputting the serial port data to a file.

It turns out... it's just a MIDI stream. That's it. The NES people figured that out a while ago too: https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=5603

Wrote some code to transfer between the OS's MIDI and DOSBox's transparent nullmodem: https://github.com/Sgeo/midi2miracle . Work in progress unless I get bored and wander away.

I started trying to convert between instrument numbers (Miracle Piano doesn't use General MIDI, and wow does it sound bad. The practice room especially plays an annoying flute. I think that's supposed to be a metronome-like sound).

I don't know much about music, maybe I should ask AI to help devise a good mapping for the instrument sets.

I also wondered if I should have necroposted, since people were asking about the Miracle Piano System here before.

Also, I'm saying "simple" because I was quite enthused to hear "Simple Gifts" when I got the output working.

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Reply 2 of 3, by BitWrangler

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That's the one I was trying to remember when ppl were asking about PC music keyboards the other day. Miracle, yah, they had a kit for nearly every system going C64, PC, Apple... were kinda pricey back in the day though. Like double the price of a "consumer" but decent Yamaha keyboard of similar size.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 3 of 3, by Sgeo

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It turns out someone already wrote a MIDI<->Serial bridge: https://projectgus.github.io/hairless-midiserial/

The download was erroring but it was present in Wayback Machine

I also finally got com0com working on my machine. I (think) I needed 3.0.0 in order for Hairless MIDI<->Serial to see the ports. Found a signed version linked from https://reactos.org/wiki/Com0com although I don't know about the authenticity.

So, emulated keyboard -> loopMIDI port -> Hairless MIDI IN. Hairless MIDI OUT -> PC synthesizer
Hairless serial port one of the com0com ports, DOSBox using directserial realport the other com0com port.

My midi2miracle program no longer needed, except that this setup requires com0com installed.

It might still be worthwhile for me to write a program translating MIDI events from Miracle Piano MIDI to General MIDI, so music playback from the program sounds better.

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