MIDI workstation Day 2

Finally, all connections are beautifully setup. Now the D-9 MIDI port looks like original design:) Inside the box, I have to directly solder the three signals on the sound card board.

To get the best possible MIDI quality with the available hardwares, the original ESS1868 ISA card is replaced by a Creative PCI64 (actually an Ensoniq EM1370 card). Since all three PCI slots are all possessed (sound card, display card, dvd decoder card), a vintage Intel EtherExpress 16 ISA network card is currently installed. Unfortunately, this card is neither PnP nor supported by Win2K. I’m testing the Win98 driver now.

Although I have an extra 1.6G harddisk could be fitted to this computer, I decided to do that later together with replacing ATX power supply. The hardware modification is temporerly frozen from now:) Software deployment will start from tomorrow.

Software todo:

- install original wavetable support for Creative card.

- find some piano teaching software and install.

- install cakewalk or other composer software.

- tune arcade game emulator

- make network card working under W2K

- play with OS/2 live cd

- play with DSL live cd

Later hardware todo:

- check Dxr2 TV out support for GUI display

- ATX power supply upgrade

- install second 1.6G harddisk with second OS

BTW: Surprisingly, among those popular old sound cards, Yamaha 724 is one of the best MIDI quality. The disadvantage of Ensoniq EM1370 is they didn’t open their wavetable format even the card actually support dynamic wavetable loading. That means it’s impossible to delivery new instruments by third party. What a pity! Maybe software synthesizer can resolve this problem, but I’m not sure if this K6-3D 450 machine is capable to do that.