VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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Right, so a while ago I posted a thread discussing ways to get MIDI out of my Thinkpad 365ED. No conclusions reached.

Well I was looking at it the other day and realized it has a MIDI port built in. Unfortunately this being '90s IBM it uses a proprietary mini-mini-D-sub-thing that I've never seen anywhere else.

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It's the port on the upper right. Just 1cm wide! The one below it is for the external floppy drive.

There is an official gameport/MIDI port cable for this which adapts it to a standard DB15. The IBM part # is 75H7576. There are currently none on Ebay, but several creaky looking "thinkpad-parts-online!" type websites claim to have them in stock and might sell me one for $30 US. Plus another $25 for shipping (UPS only, of course) and who knows what in 'brokerage' & taxes. *IF* they even have them, and *if* they are the right cables as there are apparently different ones for different Thinkpads, and *if* they don't accidentally send me the wrong one & give me no recourse to return it when it arrives and doesn't work. Then I *might* be able to have one for approx. $75+ in my money when it finally gets here. Meh.

So naturally I'd rather build my own. Was this little connector used in anything else? Anyone have a likely source for me?

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