Uhhhh..... My BIOS is an issue? You lost me, Ben. My motherboard manual *tells me* to set the BIOS to game if I want to use a joystick on the port, or set the BIOS to *midi* if I want to attach midi devices to it... Same situation for both the Athlon/Linux box (using AMI BIOS) and the Celeron/WinME box (using an award BIOS). The motherboard owners manuals for 2 different systems are not to be believed? I think these boxes are fairly representative of common PCs.

Also, nothing anywhere (in all the manuals) has ever mentioned needing any adapters, can you post manufacturer names and part numbers for what you are referring to? And the computers I've mentioned are PC, I know that older Macintoshes (68k era stuff) needed adapters, is that what you are thinking?

Finally, the cable that came with the keyboard has a din on one end (this end plugs into the keyboard), and the other end of the cable splits into two; the 2 ends are male and female, and the keyboard documents say that one connection is for the PC connection, the other is for a joystick. Both of these connections are D-SUB designs, of the proper type to mate with the midi connector on the 2 systems. I believe this is the cable to which you have referred as 'midi to gameport cable'. Does this cable replace the adapter that you mentioned?


-- Matthew 28:19,20



--- Benjamin Flaming <lau@solobanjo.com> wrote:
On Thursday 06 May 2004 10:09 am, Lee Dunbar wrote:
> [snip: trying to connect an old MIDI keyboard from windows 3.x era]

     Just for the record, I also have such a keyboard, and it still works just 
fine.  If it a is standard MIDI device with a MIDI-to-gameport cable, there 
should be no problem.

> BIOS says midi/game is set to midi (only other option for that port is
> game)....

     This *may* be wrong, and *might possibly* be the source of your trouble.  
Is the port actually a MIDI port?  If it isn't, you might be confusing things 
by telling the BIOS that it is.  I'm not sure how that particular BIOS 
setting would affect port communication, but it is common to use a standard 
gameport for MIDI, via an adapter.  You shouldn't have to change your BIOS 
settings.

     You could probably do a bit of testing under Windows by installing the 
gameport MIDI driver.  I don't remember what the driver is called, but look 
for something with MPU401 in the name.  It may be installed already.  I'm not 
advocating that you move away from Linux, of course, but this could give you 
another temporary testing platform by which to establish whether or not your 
keyboard and cabling is okay.

Good luck,

|)
|)enji



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