Onboard motherboard midi port with MT-32

[buckrogers]

I am considering purchasing an Asus motherboard mainly due it having an onboard midi / game port (via headers and special cable). In the bios the port's number can be 300 or 330.

My aim is to send midi signals via the onboard midi port to an MT-32 and GM external modules, while a SB compatible soundcard handles digital effects.

I take it all one needs to do is assign an unused port number in the mobo's bios (say 300), and in the set blaster section in the autoexec.bat. "point" DOS to that port number. E.g., :

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P300

Where:
A220 is the I/O Port address of the soundcard (e.g, SB Live! PCI)
I5 is the IRQ or Interrupt number of the soundcard
D1 is the DMA IRQ number of the soundcard
T4 is the Soundblaster type (or emulation mode)
P300 is the midi port you wish DOS to send midi signals to..

Does anyone have experience getting an onboard midi port to serve this function?

[Mau1wurf1977]

Only one way to find out...

Though I had little (no) luck getting onboard soundcard to work in DOS (Despite them having a legacy option)...

But it's worth a shot. Just remove the soundcard for testing, hook up a midi cable, launch a game and see if it works (or not).

Personally though I would stick with a mainboard with ISA slots, a Roland MPU401 (or compatible) midi card and a Sound Blaster.

On many Sound Blasters you can also disable the midi port (e.g. on the AWE64)

[buckrogers]

Thanks. Looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and order it. The problem is most pci soundcards do not have midi out support in DOS, hence the interest in this particular mobo with a midi out onboard.

I do have a selection of 440BX asus boards on hand (p3B-f rev103, 104, p2b-DS 106) and an awe64 gold and non pnp sb16, as well as an MPU-PCP-T nib, but would like to build a more modern machine with some DOS compatibility for games. DOS, Win98, 2000, XP. A true multipurpose machine with some modern niceties.

[Mau1wurf1977]

On a PCI machine, the best I could manage was General Midi for Music and Sound Blaster 16 for Speech / Sound effects with one of these:

- AudioPCI and Creative rebrands
- Live!
- Audigy

The drivers are on the mame website and compatibility was very good with newer DOS games (Doom, Blood, Duke Nukem 3D) but struggled with older games (Sierra, Lucasarts...)

There is a 8MB wavefont for these cards and they sound ok...

But no chance with getting the external midi port going...