Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!hale!whinery
From: whinery@hale.ifa.hawaii.edu (Alan Whinery)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: MIDI Interface
Keywords: MIDI
Message-ID: <10285@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 19:36:56 GMT
References: <3757.658193903@lemsys.UUCP> <10268@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> <16585@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu
Organization: Institute For Astronomy, Hawaii
Lines: 31

In article <16585@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> lairdkb@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Kyler Laird) writes:
>In article <10268@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> whinery@hale.ifa.hawaii.edu (Alan Whinery) writes:
>>Whoa! Although the serial port and serial device on the mighty Amiga can 
>>handle the 31,250 baud necessary for MIDI, most other machines (for 
>>instance, IBM & compatibles generally cannot. You will find that the 
>>serial handler in MS-DOS is not capable of higher than 19200 baud, not
>
>1) Some programs push the serial port to 56K baud, no?
>
 There may be increased speed built into BIOS in the latest versions of 
DOS, but one of the bones of contention that most programmers have had
historically with MS-DOS (through at least ~3.2) is that it doesn't handle
higher than 19200. There was an article in Dr. Dobb's on or around May '87 
which presented a new serial driver for MSDOS -- it added divisors, pushed 
up the speed, etc. I've got it at home somewhere. Ironically, it was one
issue after their MIDI issue in that same year.  As for those programs that
push up at higher speeds, they are generally "bare metal" (not through BIOS).
Making the serial port on an IBM compatible do non-standard baud rates is 
a complex, non-trivial problem. Once you get the baud rate, you have to handle
the queues, all of which represents an interrupt driven fancy bit o' 
programmin'.:^)   All I'm saying is that you should be someone who loves 
the tinkering process before you attempt to homebrew useful MIDI on an
MSDOS machine. Timers and timestamps, data compression on-the-fly,
those and other considerations  make MIDI a hairy proposition. I only 
mention all of this to stay someone from doing it "to save a little money".

Do some consulting. Spend THAT money on the MIDI. 
:^) :^) :^) {Send email flames to yourself.}

Alan 
whinery@hale.ifa.hawaii.edu