Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 10 October 2017 22:34
After a protracted wait period, I finally grabbed a Midiman MM401 MPU card, this should, in theory, let me do intelligent mode MIDI, whereas the Sound Blaster can only do UART MIDI.
Another byproduct of using a non Creative MIDI solution is you remove the hanging note bug that some versions of the Creative DSP have in some games.
So, that card above, turns out is a version 2 card. Note the empty socket and the vertical orientation.
Here is version 1 of the card (photo by chrisNova777 from http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php?topic=510.0 )
Note the horizontal orientation of the chips.
These two are sold as Midiman MM-401.. But their roms are incompatible.
Revision 1 card uses 1.15, dated 1993.
(C) Copyright 1991-1993 by Mike W. Smith.
All Rights Reserved ROM Version 1.15
Revision 2 uses 1.10 dated 1995!
MM-401 Single Port (C) Copyright 1991-1995 by Mike W. Smith.
All Rights Reserved ROM Version 1.10
I have uploaded the revision 2 1.10 I dumped from my card for others;
I also picked up my favourite SCSI card, a Tekram DC-390F, this is the last revision of the PCB they made, 3.0. It has a v3.20 ROM, but I need to update it to v3.23
It supports up to SCSI-3 protocol, with a max 40mb/s with 15 devices max on the SCSI bus. This card has 1 internal 8bit 50 pin and 1 internal 16bit 68 pin connector. Its external connector is 68pin. Its nice to have a mix of 16 and 8 bit for all the different kinds of SCSI experimenting.
I ran this card back in my FreeBSD days, and it has always been a stellar performer.
The downside? I loose 32kb UMB RAM as the Tekram loads a BIOS ROM extension.
Its interesting that most later version of the DC-390F card have a 128kb eeprom chip, but the actual rom is only 32kb. It turns out that it leaves blank the first 64kb of rom, and writes the double images of the 32kb rom into the last 64kb of the eeprom.
tags: DC390F, MIDI, MPU401, MidiMan, SCSI, Super Socket 7, Tekram
(dont include links in your comments.)