First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
Say you are one of the lucky people with a good midi card. Only problem is that the card is an ISA card and your supercharged PC has no ISA slots or room for an older PCI card with a waveblaster header. You still want to use the card with DOSBox or with a sequencer, so how do you do it? You have three options:
Option One: Obtain the equilavent standalone module. Here they are for some devices:
Roland LAPC-I = Roland CM-32L
Roland SCC-1 = Roland CM-300
Roland SCB-07 = Roland SC-7
Roland SCB-55 = Roland SC-55mkII
Yamaha DB50XG or SW60XG = Yamaha MU-10
IBM Music Feature Card = Yamaha FB-01
Option Two: Obtain a used PC with the appropriate number of ISA slots. Make sure it has 16-bit slots if you plan to use 16-bit cards. The primary function of the old PC, unless you are using it as a retro PC, is to provide power for the various cards. But if you are not planning to really use this PC, you still need it for a secondary purpose. That purpose is to load drivers to initialize the midi interfaces of the various cards. Sound Blaster cards will not send midi data to a waveblaster card unless programmed to do so, which requires loading a driver in the autoexec.bat or config.sys at startup. Roland cards will not send sysex commands to a sound source, which is essential for MT-32 music, unless the MPU-401 interface is programmed to do so. You should be able to include all this functionality on a boot disk. Your primary PC will also need an external midi interface to send the midi data to the cards. The 5.25 bay drives for the Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy and X-Fi should work.
