https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Category:Sound_Cards

Needs to go there too

Hi everyone,

I promised I would come back with an update, and today feels like exactly the right day to do it.

When I last posted here in February, I was still stuck on that cable. The young technician had returned, but the crossover cable we built turned out to be wired incorrectly — point-to-point instead of null modem. Back to square one.

The solution came from an unexpected place. I found a secondhand MACMAN Midiman interface on an Italian classifieds site and it came with an original Apple Mini-DIN 8 serial cable included. Twenty euros, shipping included. A few weeks later I found a second original Apple cable from a seller in Germany on eBay, also around twenty euros.

So yes, Gary — they do exist in Europe. But not easily, and not cheaply. Shipping from the US to Italy looks affordable at first — maybe 9 or 10 dollars for the cable itself — but once you add international shipping, customs duties and import taxes, the total easily reaches 50 to 60 dollars. For a 30-year-old cable. It is not a matter of not wanting to spend 10 dollars. It is a matter of real costs and real availability. Both of mine turned up by chance, not by searching, at 20 euros each with no customs surprises. The Italian and European eBay markets for these cables are nearly empty, as I discovered after months of looking.

But here is the real news.

Today, for the first time after almost a year of work, I connected the chain: PowerBook G3 Wallstreet → HyperCard 2.2 + HyperMIDI 3.0 → Apple MIDI Manager → MACMAN → Opcode Studio 4 (finally recognised by OMS after months of failures) → Roland JV-1010.

hypermidi  has also managed to send its first command  to doremidi midi-to-dmx
on scrollbarDrag newPosition
  global gMIDIPort
  put “0:176 0 ” & newPosition into midiMsg
  hmWriteMIDI gMIDIPort, midiMsg
end scrollbarDrag

The  moving head has received the message; now maybe the  real game  can begin...


For those who don't know the backstory: this is part of a larger theatrical project called LASERDREAM90 — a performance art piece that brings back to life the exact technology I used in the early 1990s for multi-image slide shows with Kodak Carousel projectors and Dataton TRAX. The Mac Classic is literally the same machine I used back then.

Thirty years later, the chain works.

Thank you all — and especially aBc — for the patience, the knowledge, and the welcome into this crazy madhouse.

Mario
Italy

ok, I'm going to try and scan and photograph everything.
I've taken apart the control16 for example
even taken the EDS daughterboard off, which reveals this the glue chip is called 'Scherzo'

For sale.

works on G4 MDD to give you scsi on oS9 and osx

£40

UK

does anyone have a copy of QuickMQ for Mac (1995, .lemur file editing app) including the SGI client program?

It's got a processor in there and one other big IC, but I guess it's only used for the PC parallel port and SMPTE features.

I've actually found one or two more that work like this now.

HI All.

Silvester here from the Netherlands.

Working in the IT and currently busy as hobbby project with the challenge to restore D-90 Data tapes from an audio archive aquired by a friend. Keep me kinda of the street

The MIDI interfaces that worked under Apple MIDI Manager, or with older software like Finale 2.0, always had a limit of 16 channels per serial port; because the MIDI data format was carried directly over the serial ports.

The older interfaces don't have their own CPUs and MIDI merge chips, so they all worked that way, even if there are 2 MIDI-INs and 2 MIDI-OUTs. The Opcode MIDI Translator Pro was one of the most common ones like that.

To connect more than 16 channels to a serial port, the interface needs to contain hardware that interprets and routes MIDI messages, and it needs to have a driver for OMS or FreeMIDI. The extra layer of data conversion also adds latency.

I can't find the Pocket Express manual, but its archived marketing page at motu.com promotes "fully independent, paired outputs", which sounds a lot like a 1:1 association of MIDI port to serial port. The interface isn't completely "dumb", though, because it has LTC to MTC and MTC to LTC timecode processing. There may be requirements for which port (A/B) receives timecode.

Translating all 32 channels to parallel could require more processing power, so it's possible that this unit contains the same or similar components to the MTP AV.

A few years ago, I bought a MOTU Pocket Express, which looks like a pretty cool 2 in / 2 out box, but with each output doubled. Pretty handy I thought, will be useful if I need a bigger MIDI setup later but don't want to use my 1U rack MTP.

Well, a few days ago I tried to get it to work, and after spending a night with different versions of FreeMIDI trying to get it to recognize it, an annoying thing became apparent: the sets of MIDI I/O are labelled A and B respectively, and on the PC side it has a parallel port labelled "A/B"... but the Mac side has two serial ports, and one is labelled A and one for B! So it's not actually a 32 channel MIDI interface, it's two 16 channel ones in one box. I'm neither impressed nor amused, since I don't want to use both my serial ports for MIDI. Weird design if you ask me, but I suppose it saved MOTU a few yanqui pesos back then... on the plus side, I supposed it'll work as two two dumb MIDI boxes for connecting to different machines if you need that for some reason.

Hey everyone, for the Mac OS X gamers out there I've just released a universal binary of GameBox for Mac OS X 10.2.8 - 10.11 El Capitan.

I've also added cloud syncing, chat rooms, game bundle installation via game packs, and a German localised build to the latest version (OS 8 - OSX). It also supports running and tracking OS 9 games under Classic Environment