Hi everyone, Rees here, and welcome to ctrl-alt-rees!
In this video I'm going to be checking out some MIDI devices for DOS gaming on my 486,
including these Roland sound modules, something running on a Raspberry Pi,
and I'm also going to be having a look at this hardware MIDI interface card to
see whether it makes a real difference, and whether it's a worthwhile investment.
So if you want to go from this...
...to this...
...stay tuned and I'll reveal all!
But first a disclaimer: I just wanted to point out that this video is intended as
a very brief overview and general introduction to this topic. As with anything in the world of
computing and audio, and where those two meet, it's a pretty deep rabbit hole once you start
to go down it and there's a lot of people out there who are very enthusiastic and have a lot
of information to share on this topic, and it's certainly something I want to cover in future.
But for this video I'm just going to keep it very brief, I'm going to keep it very high level,
and hopefully not get too bogged down in the technical details.
So what is MIDI exactly?
Well, Wikipedia to the rescue as always:
"MIDI, an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface,
is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface,
and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments,
computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music."
Essentially, MIDI is a system that allows digital musical instruments to talk to each
other over wires, and also allows computers to control them, and these boxes I have here are
MIDI modules which are a type of synthesizer which turns that MIDI data into sound, and the way they
generally connect to a DOS PC like this one is via an adapter plugged into the 15-pin joystick port.
Now, these MIDI modules weren't common back in the day - I personally grew up
in the DOS gaming era and I don't know a single person who actually owned one - and
yet they're supported by the vast majority of games that were made at the time. So why?
Well, because in most cases the musicians who were making the music for these games
used these devices as part of their workflow anyway, and then converted the end result
to work on the sound cards of the time, so it wasn't a huge job to include the
original MIDI data for the few people out there who could afford this sort of thing.
So I'd like to start at the beginning with the Roland MT-32. This module was released in 1987
and was actually aimed at amateur musicians, basically as a way of giving them access to
a load of different instruments all in one box. Now, it's important to note that there were two
revisions of the mt-32, and the one I have here is the earlier one. The easiest way to
tell is whether there's a headphone socket on the back - which this one doesn't have.
The MT-32 has a pretty unique sound which is heavy on the marimba and woodwind instruments,
and personally I think the game that best shows it off is the original Monkey
Island - so here's how that sounds.
As you can hear, it's a pretty big step up from the AdLib card - which
was the most popular sound card at the time -
and the reason I mentioned the two different versions
of the MT-32 is because some games sound better on the first version,
and some games sound better on the second version, depending on when the game was released.
That's something that's way outside the scope of this video, but I just wanted to mention
a project called MUNT which is a modern open source solution that can emulate both versions,
so I thought I'd get it set up on a Raspberry Pi using a project called mt32-pi,
which I'll link to down in the description.
It's a bare metal implementation - so it's tiny and boots up instantly - and also
has some cool features, like support for higher end DACs on the audio output side,
and OLED screens just like the LCD display on a real MT-32. Not only can it support both versions,
it's also much cheaper than either. So here's a comparison between my real MT-32
and mt32-pi running on my Raspberry Pi 3B. I've taken the audio output from the 3.5mm jack.
Personally I think the mt32-pi sounds excellent, and pretty much indistinguishable from the
original, and with a dedicated DAC connected to the GPIO pins should sound even better.
Finally, the last thing I wanted to mention about the MT-32 is the intelligent mode.
You see, the MT-32 was programmable to an extent, and in intelligent mode
rather than just blasting MIDI data at the thing and it playing it back extra control
data is transmitted which could change some built-in parameters and change the sound.
It could also control the display on the front - although that's more of a novelty.
One of the games I've been using to test - Simon The Sorcerer - not only had no audio at all when
I tried to use it with the SoundBlaster 16 (which doesn't have intelligent mode),
but the game ran horrifically slowly as well.
A lot of games actually crash completely without it.
Now I should note that there are some sound cards out there that do support intelligent mode,
but I'm particularly attached to this one due to the fact that it has a genuine OPL3 chip on board,
which really does make a lot of other things sound better. There's also a solution called SoftMPU,
which adds intelligent mode support to sound cards that don't support it, including these
early sound blaster cards, so that's well worth investigating before spending any money.
The real reason behind this issue is that, on a PC at least,
the MT-32 was really intended to be used in conjunction with a Roland MPU-401 interface.
Genuine MPU-401s are very rare these days,
but thankfully there are some modern dedicated MIDI cards that support this mode.
I'm using the PC-MIDI ISA card I bought from SerdaShop,
but there's also the open source HardMPU project. Not only does it solve the intelligent mode issue,
but I have other reasons for wanting this card which I'll go into very shortly.
Which brings me around rather neatly to the SoundCanvas.
In 1991, MIDI was very well established in the music world, but not everything was consistent
as far as the instruments were concerned. So the General MIDI standard was released,
and the first module to fully comply with it was the SC-55. Now, there are two very interesting
things about the SC-55 - the first being that it can emulate an MT-32, at least to some extent,
so going with our Monkey Island example again here's what that sounds like.
As you can probably hear, it's not quite perfect although that
does vary a lot by game and some are better than others.
It even seems to handle intelligent mode games like Simon The Sorcerer.
I will say that between the MT-32 emulation and the General MIDI support, the SC-55 paired
with a decent MIDI card or maybe SoftMPU would be a really excellent choice for DOS gaming,
and in fact it was the very first of these modules that I bought and I was very happy with it.
The other interesting thing about the SC-55, to me at least,
is that the music for Doom was composed on it.
Robert "Bobby" Prince, a musician and contractor who'd worked with id Software on pretty much all
of their previous games, not to mention a lot of other big names, set up shop in id's conference
room with his PC MIDI keyboard and SC-55 over the summer of 1993, and hammered out Doom's soundtrack
using a list of influences given to him by John Romero - one of the game's two co-creators.
So if you want to know how Doom is truly supposed to sound, you can't go wrong with the SC-55.
A step up from that however is the SoundCanvas SC-88. This module added an LCD screen as
standard, which was once reserved for "Pro" models, and doubled the number of parts from 16
to 32, nearly tripled the number of simultaneous voices from 24 to 64, more than doubled the number
of tones from 317 to 654, and also more than doubled the number of drum sets from 9 to 22.
That's a lot of drum sets.
Here's a quick SC-88 rendition of the Star Wars
theme courtesy of LucasArts' excellent 1995 first person shooter Dark Forces.
Thanks to their ability to knock out a convincing rendition of various instruments,
the SoundCanvas modules were very popular in karaoke bars across Japan,
meaning that there's a good second-hand supply of them there. Worth bearing in
mind is that while the SC-55 and MT-32 both use a 9v center negative barrel jack power supply,
the 88 runs on mains voltage, although it can very easily be modified from japan's 100V to
the UK's 230V by soldering one wire internally, a mod that I've done on mine following a guide
from Retro Box Room which I'll link to up above and down below in the description.
Once again, a dedicated hardware interface like this PC-MIDI card
proved to be very useful when using the Roland SoundCanvas alongside the SoundBlaster 16
due to something called the "hanging note bug".
This is a well known issue with some early SoundBlaster cards that caused
random notes to get stuck when controlling an external MIDI device over the gameport.
Here's an example using level 2 of Doom,
which I recorded by hooking the SC-88 up to the game port of my SoundBlaster 16.
As you can hear, there's a high-pitched note that starts ringing out and it doesn't actually stop
until you turn the SoundCanvas off and back on again, and the reason behind it is due
to a bug in the MIDI implementation in these early SoundBlaster cards.
If we look at the same part of the game again with the SoundCanvas hooked up to
the PC-MIDI card, this time we can hear that the music plays back perfectly.
So that's my very quick introduction to MIDI devices for DOS gaming.
As I said at the beginning of the video, it's quite a complex subject
so I'll link to some more information down in the description below.
Video-wise, I can highly recommend a channel called Phil's Computer
Lab - I'll stick a link up above and in the description down below.
He's well known and respected for his scientific analysis of this kind of stuff, and goes into a
lot of detail testing and benchmarking specific setups with different sound cards and MIDI
devices - so well worth a look if that sounds like a world that you'd want to get sucked into.
Just by way of an example, he has a 3.5 hour long video just covering the MT-32,
so there's a lot to get stuck into there!
I also wanted to briefly mention an upcoming sound card for DOS machines called the Orpheus,
which incorporates the PC-MIDI chip and a genuine OPL chip for the best of both worlds.
It wasn't yet available at the time of filming, but it's something I'm watching
very closely and would very much like to have a play with once they're released.
So what are your thoughts? Do you have an MT-32, or a SoundCanvas,
or maybe something completely different?
I'm still very much learning about this stuff and
I'd love to hear about your setup so let me know down in the comments.
Also, if you have any questions at all let me know and I'll do my best to find out the answers.
Finally, if you enjoyed this video and/or found it useful, a like and a subscribe
really does help to improve my visibility and really helps me to grow the channel,
and every single one is genuinely very much appreciated, so thankyou as always.
Thank you very much for watching, and I'll hopefully see you around.