MIDI workstation Day 1

Tonight, finally, I began to connect my Casio keyboard to the computer freshly refurbished yesterday.

The circuit is quite simple since I only need MIDI out to computer, actually the most important part is an optical coupler.  A TLP521 4pin one was salvaged from an broken fax board. This time, instead directly soldering everything together immediately, I used a prototyping board and some temporary wires to test the concept and components firstly. It works beautifully with the soundcard’s hardware synthesizer.

One big issue is, I hope to connect the joystick while I connect midi keyboard. Therefore, I am going to install another 9 pin D-sub socket on the computer shell and soldering all isolation circuit inside. That means, hopefully my computer will have a new MIDI port. The bad thing is there is no internal connector on the soundcard for MIDI port. So I have to directly solder wires from sound card.

I also found a new Creative SoundBlaster Pro PCI 64 and will replace the current ESS1868 AudioDrive for better wavetable synthesizer. To empty the PCI slot for this new card, I have to replace my original 100M pci network card with a very old Intel 8120 10M ISA network card.