mt32-pi and MIDI on the Amiga

[@MisterMsk]

Great video. In regards to the MT-32. I got one some years ago. I was a little annoyed that not that many Amiga games supported it. I should of looked before purchasing. However, there are many, many MID files on the internet I was happy to play as many as I could.

[@retrobitstv]

Thanks! If you've got an accelerated AGA or RTG machine, you can also run SCUMMVM to play LucasArts games with mt32 support. My A3000 isn't up to the task though :(

[@ZanyGeek]

Same

[@poofygoof]

I still have a sysex file floating around that approximates GM default patches on an MT-32, but it's handy to have the remapping built-in to the software or the mt32-pi itself. MUNT does a pretty good job, I used to A/B it with my CM-64 and it was easy to forget which one was playing unless there were some version peculiarities that a game used (old vs new MT-32 patch differences, extra patches on CM-32L, etc...) I've heard that many dnb and jungle dancefloor fillers were done with octamed and akai samplers. I had no idea at the time. thanks for showing this off.

[@dr.rexbriefs8564]

Great video! Can't wait for mine to arrive from the U.K. I am really looking forward to going back to the games I played as a kid with soundblaster, dreaming of having the Roland Sound Canvas. Bring on the nostalgia! Oh, and speaking of hats, excellent Nürburgring hat.

[@DragonNova]

Loads of recent Amiga ports like Day of the tentacle, Doom, Dune 2 etc support native MIDI output :)

[@Huddison]

Great video. I have a MISTER and the Pi-hat - will I be able to listen to mt32 playback via the Amiga core on the MISTer (including midi tunes)?

[@retrobitstv]

Thanks! Yes, the Amiga core on the MiSTer works great with the m32-pi!

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

Loved playing midi files on my A1200 (the A500 just did not cut it :-) but they where "rendered" with a GM "soundfont" of 8 bits (probably 8 Khz samples) and lacked a bit of polyphony, reverb and so on... but still it was awesome as you knew this was the actual key/tones (mostly if it was not "remix, cover and so on) that was made by the musician 🙂 Tried the same midi files on a PC and sounded (with that "awesome" sound card) aweful... always wondered why... But then I realized many "cheapish" PC sound cards just did whatever with FM sounds to emulate GM sounds... and did not load an actual GM "soundfont" to play the sounds... Anyway... now I have project! Will turn my really cheap "synth"/midi keyboard to a MT32-pi sounding thing! (thinking Zero pi 2w would do the trick)... but not going to use any LCD, I will try VNC that stuff if possible to a phone/tablet which I have loads of... ---edit Haha! GMPlay that was the one! "rendered" midi tracked/sequenced files thru Paula :-)

[@JimLeonard]

Massively confused by the nature break, but otherwise this was a great overview of what was possible with MIDI, the system drivers, and sequencers on the Amiga. I was very surprised to learn that the combination supports general midi instrument choices via a non-gmidi device (the MT-32). Thank you for taking the time to make this! One suggestion for next time is to turn off auto-levels/auto-ISO on your camera, as the brightness during the GMPlay section kept cycling from dark to light. But nothing too serious, and of course shooting video of CRTs is always tricky.

[@retrobitstv]

Heh, the nature break is just a little silliness to celebrate the changing of the season (see also 17 year Cicadas in the Atari ST restoration video). In hindsight, I should have elaborated a bit more about the mt32-pi modes. When playing general midi files, I was using the FluidSynth mode with an SC-55 soundfont. I introduced the different modes when I initially reviewed the device and didn't want to repeat myself too much. The Sierra games were demoed using the Munt emulation mode. A neat feature of the CAMD player is that it has a translation mode to handle mt-32 .mid files being played back on a GM device. Regarding the auto-level setting, that's good feedback and I'll try and remember for next time. The camera continually turns it back on after recording has stopped which is annoying, but this is a very entry-level model (EOS M50). If I'm going to keep doing this, I should probably invest in a better camera that can adjust the shutter speed by increments smaller than 10.

[@JimLeonard]

@@retrobitstv Thanks for all the clarification! And, I confess, I'm a fan of the 17-year cicadas.

[@yucelbilik]

Very nice video, thanks.❤

[@manueljesus3147]

There was a cool music composition article in Amiga world that covered the circle of fifths as a quick way yo lean music composition. Back when making multimedia meant you should be adept at a little bit if everything. What we call a generalist today.

[@nullsmack]

6:10 lol oh man, canyon.mid playing on an Amiga through a Raspberry pi... I wasn't expecting that combo

[@retrobitstv]

Just when you think you've seen it all...

[@digitalarchaeologist5102]

Me neither - just perfect though!!

[@deanmiller5610]

Great video, I’m just putting together a Mister MT-32 pi. Was also going to have a go at connecting a MIDI keyboard and my old DOS PC. Does the audio need to be switched back to pwm from i2s in the config or does it use i2s via the Pi3 audio port?

[@retrobitstv]

If you're going to use the mt32-pi as a standalone device attached to a real DOS PC or keyboard then you'll want to switch it back to pwm and use the pi's audio port. Actually that would be an interesting experiment to see if you can use a USB MIDI interface on the pi like the UM-ONE and still pass audio back to the MiSTer over i2s at the same time... I can't think how that would be useful in any way but it might be fun to try.

[@xmaniac99]

Omg i cannot believe u hid Vangelis and the orchestra in that little box.

[@retrobitstv]

Isn't technology something? :)

[@Charleshawn66]

Nice job.

[@manueljesus3147]

Those Sierra games look good if you pull back the camera, squint your eyes, and jump up and down to add some motion blur. Some of the chalkiest slap dash color pallettes ever on a machine capable of doing better than VGA in theory.

[@gbraadnl]

3:45 I always felt cheated when opening a Midi device for the Amiga. I had another one, the Pro Midi from the same company that did the StereoMaster. You mostly paid for a plastic box.

[@markdjdeenix6846]

octocoupplers are cool .they are inline on all lan interfaces to prevent static discharge through a network into a PC

[@tetsujin_144]

14:20 - (Wondering if Sierra ports could have been done better with HAM modes and sprites) Sprites maybe, HAM modes would be more challenging because the display scrolls. One relatively simple optimization would be to use the Copper to change the palette at different places in the display. Palette changes like that were limited to 4 pixel boundaries horizontally (IIRC) but changing palette for different vertical areas of the screen (different sets of scan lines) would have been easy - so for instance, finish drawing the sky then remove "sky blue" from the palette and replace it with something else. It's unfortunate that sprites on the Amiga aren't wide/numerous to be able to work as a full-screen display layer (without repetition), but certainly sprites could have been used to add features with a different palette to a scene with mostly all one palette... But I can definitely see how that level of effort would have been outside the scope of a relatively low-effort port.

[@daishi5571]

With of the early CGA/EGA PC games the palette was truly awful but that's what they had done the graphics on, so porting it to the Amiga should have required the graphics been recolored to use the 4096 palette which would have looked amazing in comparison. But as you say, outside the scope of a low-effort port.

[@systemchris]

So an Amiga 500 with an rgb2hdmi for for modern screens, with a pistorm to up the CPU a lot, and a pimt32.... 3 pi's for one Amiga :D any other pi add-ons?

[@retrobitstv]

Haha yea, each pi capable of emulating the entire Amiga itself :) There's got to be a way to jam a 4th on in there somewhere...

[@ArturJarosik]

@@retrobitstv I have both, mt32-pi will be third on my CDTV :)

[@systemchris]

Trying to work out how the sound output is wired up? Are you capturing from the Amigas stereo output jacks or from the pi32 jack?

[@retrobitstv]

The MIDI output is was captured directly from the pi itself. As with using a real mt32 connected to any computer, you're going to have to deal with two separate sources of audio or mix them together somehow.

[@systemchris]

@@retrobitstv I always wondered that, since I never owned such equipment so it answers that :) thank you very much

[@daishi5571]

Midi is fine for playing music but I found much of the music created like this for computers used the same basic soundbank so melded all the music into the same sound game after game. What was funny was having a friend ask me over to listen to his "so much better than the Amiga sound" for some games. So I went over, and he had bought a new sound card (I cant remember which one) with a Midi port and plugged in a Midi keyboard (some Yamaha unit) that he had also bought. He said he was having a few problems (he had literally just bought and unboxed it) so I helped set it up for him and we got to listening to some games music and he amazed within a few minutes. The first few games were newish so no big issue, music played well after setting it up. However he then discovered that his sound card only worked with Midi when connected, so no sound from it! so in game sounds only came from the PC speaker which sounded terrible at the best of times, but when combined with the Midi it managed to make it sound worse. Then he wanted to play some older games and discovered that neither his sound card or midi could be used, he was crushed and just refused to believe it wasn't just a fixable technical problem. What made it all worse, was what he had been promised by the sales guy that for spending almost $3000 (~$6000 adjusted for inflation from 1993) that it would blow everything away. I eventually got him to buy a SoundBlaster so he could have Midi and sound effects but it was a hard sell because he had been burned so bad. What confused him the most was he expected both music and sound effects to be handled by the keyboard which of course it doesn't (I have seen a couple of games do it but hearing lasers as guitars and explosions as cymbals doesn't actually sound good).

[@manueljesus3147]

Most of those PC sales douches were failed used car salesmen. Didn't know WTF they were talking about.

[@_fora]

Octamed sound studio (what you were running) can handle up to 64 tracks, audio + midi combined, of course this all cpu dependent

[@retrobitstv]

That would explain why the scroll bar had so much extra real estate when I was adding track 5! I barely got a chance to mess around with it, but will be ordering up a cable to hook up a MIDI keyboard so I can input notes properly.

[@_fora]

@@retrobitstv Yh, absolutely it’s totally worth checking out! the name is deceptive as it started off as an 8 voice tracker using clever audio mixing routines, the last version of Octamed (6 & sound studio) totally expanded on that concept allowing more than 8 sound channels with 14bit audio via the Paula sound chip or 16bit with compatible sound cards. Definitely a beefed 68k series cpu is needed (or accelerator) for multiple 14bit audio channels via Paula. It’s an awesomely capable tracker for its time, one of my favourites on the Amiga platform.

[@lsdowdle]

I hope you have an Atari ST tee-shirt somewhere... because that's another video I'd like to see... as the Atari ST was well know for all of the professional MIDI applications that were somewhat widely adpoted by the industry at the time. There were also programs for newbies and hobbyists like... if I'm remembering correctly, Activisions Music Studio. I believe most of those older programs can be found in various Atari ST software archives online as the producers have long moved onto other platforms and much newer versions. Ok, now I've watched the entire video... and for some reason, I was hoping you were going to show how it worked from the MiniMig core on the MiSTer FPGA. Would that be possible? And also the Atari ST core on the MiSTer FPGA. I don't have any of the original hardware and love using the MiSTer FPGA for as much stuff as possible.

[@retrobitstv]

I actually tested all of the software on the Minimig core before filming using the real hardware! In this video I demo using the mt32-pi with the MiSTer's ao486, Atari ST, and Minimig cores: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p4bdZmCejJahZrc I have used my real Atari ST with proper Roland hardware that I borrowed in the past, but it would work just as well with the mt32-pi and the UM-One.

[@re8et355]

gold

[@infinitecanadian]

The MT-32-pi didn't exist back in 1987.

[@infinitecanadian]

19:31 Sure, don't show us what the finished version sounds like!

[@lcaise]

Is it possible to use it with kind of oldskul midi soft like Cubase at Atari ST, but with Amiga ?

[@tetsujin_144]

There are MIDI authoring tools on the Amiga, don't know too much about them, though. I got myself a copy of Music-X planning to use it with my Sound Canvas maybe. OctaMED is primarily a tracker but version 2 also supports MIDI authoring. According to the author of Music-X there was a problem with the Amiga serial port hardware that made it unreliable for MIDI input from a keyboard controller - but I can't verify that myself.

[@spindreams]

@@danielktdoran Music-X is the best midi sequencer on any computer of the era let alone just the amiga (better than Cubase)

[@spindreams]

@@danielktdoran Back then there was no such thing as a "DAW", even Cubase was not called a DAW at that time, they were all just MIDI sequencers which controlled midi instruments like synths and samplers. The Amiga on the other hand has 8 bit Sample audio and so Music-X which could also play the amigas internal sound was probably as close to what you would think of as a DAW like you see today.

[@kyma1999x]

well yes, I used a lot amiga 500 and then 1200 in past for midi production, there was not cubase or notator or logic for amiga, but there were some others like passport trax, mastertracks.....and the best of all bars and pipes professional. It was a very powerful midi environment which combined with the patch meister of the same software house (blue ribbon soundworks) was a complete midi solution for midi sequencing, notation and patch editing/librarian, it was the only package able to compete with mac/atari based stuff from steinberg, c-lab/emagic, motu or opcode.

[@spindreams]

@@kyma1999x You obviously never used Music-X, I used a lot of sequencers back in the day mainly on ST in a pro studio, Steinberg and C-Lab incuded, B&P was okay but a pain to use, Music-X just worked and has so many features, built in SysEx storage, midi patch libraries & filters, Amiga sample support, SMPTE / Midi TC support, the list goes on..