Re: [B2-devel] Midi support in Basilisk (by hook or by crook)

[Em A. <ade...@gm...>]

As someone involved in a number of those threads... it seems to me it should be possible to implement MIDI on modern hardware via BII — the big issue was that the emulation isn’t fully documented, and nobody was working on the source to the degree that updates would be feasible for the serial emulation.  Fusion emulates MIDI, so it’s definitely possible, even if the timing isn’t accurate or a carrier has to be emulated.

I’m pretty sure Fusion does it by patching through to DOS MIDI.ignoring clock emulation and carrier signal.

A few years back we tried piping serial to a command line program that would respond with the expected signal, but somehow we still ended up with buffers that weren’t emptying and the MIDI throughput would just stop.  We even tried only MIDI input to DMCS from a .mid file, but had the same issues with the buffer filling and the data stream stopping.

> On Jul 2, 2018, at 3:54 PM, Brent Busby <br...@ke...> wrote:
> 
> Ricky Zhang <zha...@gm...> writes:
> 
> [...]
>> TBH, I still don’t understand the MIDI application INs and OUTs. How
>> and why do you expose serial port in guest OS to the serial port in
>> host OS? Do you have serial/parallel port MIDI keyboard (a physical
>> hardware in host OS)?
> 
> Yes, the usefulness of this is for people who want to run legacy Midi
> applications in the real world outside the emulator, either with
> physical equipment (my case), or to communicate with software
> instruments/effects running in the host OS, or possibly doing both at
> the same time.  I've seen some threads in the E-maculation forums from
> people wanting similar things over the years, and generally they were
> told that the time synchronization would be too difficult to provide
> steady tempo, so it wasn't worth doing.
> 
> So I went into this thinking that if that were the only hindrance, then
> don't worry about it and just let the bytes come out as they will.  A
> patch editor doesn't need steady tempo, and probably in many cases the
> timing jitter for actual sequencer playback wouldn't be that bad on a
> modern machine anyway, especially if the software running in the
> emulator was slaved to time from the host OS.
> 
> And it turns out that old Mac serial ports are a much murkier subject
> than the aforementioned concerns about time stability allude to.  Like,
> lions and tigers and bears, oh my sort of murkier.  It wants a 1MHz
> signal of some kind coming into a pin on the port that normal telecomm
> doesn't even use, which would probably have to be emulated to satisfy
> what applications like SPVE are wanting to see.  (Or at least the driver
> would have to be lied to so it thinks the signal is there, while
> actually getting the 31250 baud timing another way.)
> 
> Here are a few links to the threads I saw, just so you know I'm not the
> only person who'd like to do something like this:
> 
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9103
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8364
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7277
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7674
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7668
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8439&start=50
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9459
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5657
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7047&start=1025
> 
> Here's someone wanting to try QEMU for this, with different problems (of
> course, because true VM's are very isolated from their hosts):
> https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9601
> 
> Also, there's a whole web site for running studio apps on pre-OSX here,
> but they seem to be very hostile to any kind of emulation.  They want
> real old Macs, which doesn't seem to me like a solution that will last
> too long: http://www.macos9lives.com/
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