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From: jones@sdd.hp.com (Christopher Jones)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware,sci.electronics
Subject: Re: MIDI
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.170919.16645@sdd.hp.com>
Date: 14 Nov 90 17:09:19 GMT
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In article <4840.tnews@basso.actrix.co.nz> dgold@basso.actrix.co.nz (Dale Gold) writes:
>Quoted from - cs161fhn@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou):
>> On my room mate's Amiga, he plugs a little box into his serial port
>> and voila! he's got MIDI in, out, and thru.
>> [...]
>> Why can't you do this on an IBM?  What does the Roland MPU-401 
>> have that a modified serial interface doesn't?  
>
>A friend of mine has built an IBM interface based roughly on my homemade
>Amiga box. The problem is that all (?most?) of the good IBM software
>is designed for the MPU-401, which has a lot of built-in features. Don't
>ask me what they are! :-) My friend is going to write his own s/ware, so
>for him, it's not a problem.
>
>
>Cheers, Dale 


I've also designed and built an IBM-Midi interface which 
"uses" the serial port to operate.  Uses in quotes, because
I'm not using the IBM serial port's hardware, but rather
its COM2 port address and protocol.  The interface card
connects directly to the XT bus, and employs a 12MHz 
8051 microcontroller to UART and timestamp MIDI data.  

I realize that this isn't exactly what Dennis was talking 
about, but in order to accomplish that (as someone has mentioned),
you'd have to change the oscillator on the IBM serial port's
hardware, or build an intelligent serial<--->serial converter,
perhaps with the MCS-51 chip.



/ctj