Articles tagged “MIDI”
Making your own Dreamcast MIDI Interface Cable
I love an unusual accessory for a video game console or computer, and one such accessory is the Dreamcast MIDI Interface Cable, HKT-9200, which allows you to connect MIDI devices to the Dreamcast console's serial port. Only released in Japan and with only one piece of software released for it — the O･to･i･re (お･と･い･れ) sequencer – these are a somewhat hard to find accessory nowadays and prices for second-hand units are far beyond what I could hope to afford (at the time of writing there are two on eBay, both for over £300).
Vista and MIDI
I have a Creative Audigy SE sound card, which provides hardware MIDI synthesis. However, under Vista, there was no way (that I could see) to change the default MIDI output device to this card, meaning that all apps were using the software synthesiser instead. Vista MIDI Fix is a 10-minute application I wrote to let me easily change the default MIDI output device. Applications which use MIDI device 0 still end up with the software synthesiser, unfortunately. To get the hardware MIDI output device available I needed to install Creative's old XP drivers, and not the new Vista ones from their site.
A productive weekend
What with the weekend having an extra Monday tacked on for good measure (Labour Day), I felt the need to be productive. I also felt the need to listen to VGM files converted to MIDI, so rustled up a VGM to MIDI converter. There already is one (available on the SMS Power! site), but I could never get it to work. Having never really puzzled out the YM2413 ('OPLL', FM chip) I limited it to the square-wave generating PSG. First of all, you need to be able to convert a tone register value (from 0 to 1023), the period of the output square wave, to a MIDI key value (0 to 127, where every 12 keys represent an octave).