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
