17 (!) Screws later and my Roland D-550 has a new battery. Fortunately it is not soldered, a CR2032 held in place by a metal tab. it is back up, reset, and now just have to load the presets through sysex. I have the important patches on an external card anyways as I share it between the D50 and the D550.
#synth #roland #lapc #mt32 #d20 #d50 #d550 #LASynthesis #studio #gear #midi #repair
I really like my Roland D-05, it really sounds like the old D-50. However, far too many of the best D-50 presets have been claimed by Enya. As much as I try, I can't play anything but Orinoco Flow with Pizzagogo. Enya loves the D-50 and used its presets on so many of her songs, I really need to convert my old library of homemade LAPC-I/MT-32 patches to D-50 so I can play something else.
#roland #d50 #d05 #lapc #mt32 #synth
I bought something yesterday, chose to get an electronic receipt.
Now, I’m subscribed to a newsletter? I’m sorry, but no! I do not want your newsletter, I did not consent to it.
- - -
J’ai acheté quelque chose hier. J’ai choisi un reçu électronique.
Maintenant, je suis abonné à une infolettre? Je suis désolé, mais non! Je ne la veux pas votre infolettre; je n’y ai pas consenti.
I've got a free account on ChatGPT, but I rarely use it. It's not much fun since all the fun stuff is censored, and it's not very useful, either, because it tends to make stupid mistakes and hallucinate. I tried to find out how to emulate the Roland MPU-401 ART mode with DOSbox under Linux, something that I vaguely remembered to be possible, yet the necessary software seems to have gone missing. It paraphrased the information I remembered reading years ago on some emulator forums, but the links were all dead.
You see, almost no MIDI software ever used the ART mode on Roland MPU interfaces, they all used the UART mode, except for the one piece of software with which I made all of my music as a teenager in the early 1990s, Ballade by Dynaware. I've got all these synth patches I made and dearly miss for LAPC-I/MT32/CM32L, and all these MIDI songs using those patches, but I would need an old 486 running MS-DOS to put my old LAPC-I in, which of course is a full length 8-bit ISA card and contains the original MPU-401. I've also got the external version of the LAPC-I, the CM32L, which is a cheaper and simplified version of the famous MT32 without display, knobs, or buttons, except for the power switch and the volume knob, just a beige box with MIDI In/Out/Through and Line Out L/R. For any other software than Ballade, I could just connect it to any MIDI interface, since MPU UART emulation has been the standard for MIDI interfaces for decades, but Ballade needs ART, not UART, therefore I need that emulator software.
In UART mode, the MIDI interface acts like a dumb serial port, all the actual MIDI data processing is done in software. The ART mode, however, does all that MIDI protocol stuff for you, you just pump the raw MIDI data in and out. It was significantly faster in the days of the 8086, but by the time of the 286, it had already lost its advantage, and on 486 machines, it could even cause problems if the CPU tried to get MIDI data into the MPU faster than it could process it. I don't know why the people at Dynaware chose to use that mode. The early DOS versions of Ballade were tailor-made for the Roland MT32/CM32L/CM64/LAPC-I series of MIDI synth modules and sound cards, combining sequencer and sound editor into one package. My LAPC-I sound card was my first synthesizer, and it was basically just a D50 without a keyboard and with different firmware for multitimbral orchestration and different PCM ROMs with some FX samples for PC games. Very rich, powerful, thick sound, DOS game music sounded so bloody awesome with it, but I mostly used it to make my own. But that music has been locked away since my Pentium II 233MHz died, which was the last machine in which the sound card worked properly. Ballade even uses its own virtual file system built on top of FAT16, it's incompatible with FAT32, every folder appears as a single file under DOS with the filetype *.box, I can't find any documentation.
#chatgpt #useless #lapc #lapc-i #mt32 #cm32l #ballade #emulation #emulator #midi #synth #synthesizer #electronicmusic #fat16 #fat32 #msdos #sequencer #midisequencer #dosbox
DOSBox Staging Basics
Today: Roland LA music synthesizers
The LAPC-I (short for Linear Arithmetic Synthesis for IBM-PCs) is a ISA music synthesizer card released by Roland in 1989.
It’s basically a Roland CM-32L which was a standalone unit combined with a MPU-401 interface.
The CM-32L of course is emulated in DOSBox Staging as well as its older brother the MT-32 using the wonderful MUNT emulator.
The necessary ROM files can be found on archive.org.
Watch @root42's excellent video for more info and audio examples
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO-RkVkeu2o
#DOSBox-Staging #DOSBox #DOSGaming #MS-DOS #Emulation #RetroGaming #LinuxGaming #MacGaming #FOSS #Roland #MIDI #MT-32 #LAPC-I #CM-32L
It is nice to have the floppy disk drive working again on the Roland D20. It was the only D series synthesizer to have a disk drive.
The D10, D20, D110 and even D5 did share a memory #card slot, both in #ROM and #RAM formats and are fully compatible across that range (the Roland D50 is not as it is the previous generation LA synthesis and is different in the number and parameter types)
Let's check out a few of them in this thread...
Even if a shop has a floppy disk marked as good, and it worked when it went on the shelf, doesn't mean it will work by the time it gets to you...
Couldn't get this drive to work with my Roland D-20. Quick look inside and the belt just turned into permanent ink, err, I mean black goo. Nasty and messy. After a good amount of cleaning and a new belt, and...
It works!
#synth #synths #Roland #d20 #floppy #disk #hardware #sequencer #keyboard #repair #diy #synthesizer #lapc #mt32 #synthesis
pendant ce temps… hier, à la Forge de la bière #LaPC https://mamot.fr/media/DG9OJBIP_SWN0PzNjzE https://mamot.fr/media/Y4ItoQ9NEuPDwc2kIRk
