Hi and welcome to Retro Erik. In this video we are comparing different MIDI synthesizers from Serdashop. If you are following my channel, you have probably seen my videos om MIDI devices. All of them are in fact supplied by Serdashop.
Serdashop has specialized in making MIDI synthesizers for the Wave Blaster connector, or as we call it today, the Wave-Table header. His products range from the Economical McFly, The ESS based E-Wave, and more advanced synthesizer like the DreamBlaster X2 and the DreamBlaster X16 where you can upload your own Sound Fonts. Serdashop also has MIDI solutions for the printer port and the serial port. I have made a video on all printer port audio devices from Serdashop. If you are into sound on retro computers, you will want to check it out.
But before we start comparing gadgets, let’s explain Wave-Table Synthesizers. In 1992 Creative Labs came out with the SoundBlaster 16 sound card. It came with a new 26-pin header called the Wave Blaster connector. The Wave
Blaster connector allows users to install a daughterboard called the Wave Blaster. The Wave Blaster is an add-on MIDI-synthesizer. It is a sample-based synthesizer that is General MIDI compliant. The Wave Blaster adds hundreds of real instruments and drum kit samples that can be used to bring more authentic music and sound effects to your PC. People often believe that General MIDI or GM, was created by Roland, and that the only real and authentic General Midi sound for DOS gaming at the time, was the Roland Sound Canvas. This probably has root in the fact that Sound Canvas often
was used by game studios for testing and balancing their General MIDI soundtracks. But in fact, there is no definitive answer on what the best General MIDI synthesizer for DOS gaming is. It basically comes down to what you feel, is the sound that best fits your taste. Actually, General MIDI was developed by the American MIDI Manufacturers Association and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee. It was first published back in 1991. The Wave Blaster port was adopted by other sound card manufacturers who produced both daughterboards and soundcards with the expansion-header: Diamond, Ensoniq, Guillemot, Oberheim, Orchid, Roland, TerraTec,[1] Turtle Beach,[2] and Yamaha. The header also appeared
on devices such as the Korg NX5R MIDI Synth and the Oberheim MC-1000/MC-2000 keyboards. Later Roland defines a new standard called GS, it’s basically the same as GM plus some new features like more instruments and effects. These new features in the Roland new GS standard were especially useful in games. We should also explain the Roland MT32 before moving on to the comparison. Already back in 1987 Roland releases the MT32 external synthesizer. It had 128 synths and 30 rhythm sounds, playable on 8 channels. It even had reverb effect to give the
sound more space or depth. It quickly grew popular among gaming developers. One of the reasons for this was the Linear Arithmetic synthesis engine. They used the LA engine to generate new sounds and was very useful for sound effects in games. The Linear Arithmetic synthesis engine is one of the reasons the MT32 is so hard to replicate.
Due to its popularity Roland would two years later release the LAPC1 as an ISA card for the PC. The LA in the name is because it has the Linear arithmetic synthesis engine. The LAPC1 is a Roland CM-32L and an MPU-401 MIDI interface. The CM-32L is basically the MT32 plus 33 sound effects mostly for gaming. So, if you have a game which needs a CM32L, and you only have a MT-32 , you will get some instruments playing instead of sound effects, like here on GODS. We now understand Wave-Table headers, General MIDI or GM, Roland GS, the MT32 and the CM32L.
We can now start comparing MIDI devices. This is not a video of all his devices, but only the once in my collection. First out is this S2P. This is the parallel port version of the Dreamblaster S2. Its’s one of Serdashop’s low-priced General MIDI devices. I have the parallel port version of this because I wanted a parallel port Genel Midi for my laptops without a sound card. With this,
my laptops now have at least music. And for games like Monkey Island or Sierra games MIDI Music is all I need. To get it working you need a utility that redirects MIDI to the paralell port. This is done with SoftMPU. The only drawback with SoftMPU is that it needs a 386 computer or better. But luckily for us there patch for a few games out there. Like Doom and other games using the same sound engine. Games that use the Miles Audio Interface Library and most importantly.
Most Sierra games, except for the oldest ones. One of the things I like with this paralellport version, is that low noise. Since it’s not installed ON the soundcard, it does not pick up any noise from the PC, or the Soundcard’s internal mixer. The S2P has it’s own line out, and power
in. As loong as how have a good power supply, you will get very good sound quality out of this. Talking about sound quality. As mentioned sound earlier in this video, sound is subjective. I feel that in games like Doom, Doom2 or prehistoric the sound is very much to my likings. So, to summarize. The DreamBlaster S2 parralellport version is a very good option for a laptop computer. There is no noise that I can hear. And I like the sound of the General Midi instruments on this SAM2695 sound chip.
The MP32L is built on the mt32 Pi Project on GitHub, so you can download the all the upgrades from the mt32 pi GitHub sites. It has 256 banks. That means that it can have 256 different sound fonts. Of course it does not have any licensed bank from Roland, but it's made to be as compatible as possible especially when it comes to the MT32 and the CM32L. That is the whole point with the mt32 Pi Project. It does not have a wave table connector so you cannot connect this directly on your sound card it has a d media port and that is how you connect it to your sound card you can connect it uh to the joystick port on your sound card you if you have um midi card you can of course use that or if you don't you can actually also use the MPU232 witch is a Serial port to MIDI interface also made by Serdashop. It has a line out with a very good DAC so this will also not pick up noise from your computer once again be sure to use a decent power supply the one that's the Serdaco sells is very good and as far as I know does not pick up any noise.
It has a OLED display it's quite cool some games like Sierra games they actually use that display to send messages. One of the really good things about this device is that it has four buttons and you can use two of them to change the sound Bank on the fly so if you start up the device in General MIDI modus and then you realize you wanted Roland GS. Well you just use the display and the buttons and choose Roland GS or MT32 or whatever other bank you want to use. Just give it a second or two to load before it will kick
in. One more good thing about this device is that you can easily move it around from different computers so you can use this on your Atari, Amiga or any of your PC's very easily. Next out is the WP32 McCake. It's also built on the mt32 Pi Project on GitHub but instead of using our Raspberry Pi 3A Plus or later you can use a cheaper Raspberry Pi compute module 4 light. This
makes the whole unit smaller and therefore you can fit everything on one card with a wave table header. So with all the talk about the wave table header in the beginning of this video, we finally have one of the cards with a wave table header so this card you can put directly on your sound card and keep it inside your computer. He has also made a external display that fits in one of your drive bays with a nice OLED display and four buttons to choose bank and set the volume. This is a very
neat setup since it's built on the same mt32 Pi Project it has basically the same settings when it comes to Banks, memory and all the other things. It does not have a line out, so the sound out from this will have to pass through your sound card and could therefore pick up some internal noise. One thing I didn't mention about MP32L was the sound font support. Since these two devices are built on the mt32 Pi Project they use the same sound font format - the sf2. The SF2 format you probably heard about that before. It was developed by Creative Labs for use with a Sound Blaster card. So actually the same sound fonts you can upload on your Sound Blaster with memory,
can use on this. If you Google the internet for SF2 fonts you will find a lot of them. And then we have the X2 GS Second Edition. I've made a video on the X2 - the original one. But this is now replaced by the Second Edition and the one that Serdashop sent me
this time has a Roland GS licensed sound font built in. That is why it uses the letters GS in the name of this sound device. It has two Banks one is pre-loaded with Roland GS and the other one you can load whatever you want. But if we go down in this table we see that the format it needs is a proprietary dream Bank format dream is the supplier of the MIDI chip that is used on this board but luckily for us there are ways to convert sf2 sound fonts to the dream Bank format you will find more information on Serdashop's web pages. You can get this without the licensed GS Bank from Roland and you will save a few €'s on that. The X2
has a Preset Editor application for Windows where you can upload sound fonts. You can change a lot of settings in the sound fonts and basically adjust the sound to your liking. It has a wave blaster connector and that is how this board is supposed to be connected. But you can also connect it with the MIDI-Cloud directly to your joystick port or with a chill V external MIDI board.
It does not have a line out so the sound has to pass through your sound card And then we have the X16. My version is the X16 with the licensed Roland GS sound fonts. If you are using this for dos gaming I really urge you to buy the GS version. The X16 has eight banks for sound phones and it can also play 256 instruments at the same time very few games uses more than 33 pylyphones or 33 instruments playing. It has 1 GB for sound fonts.
That means that you can load pretty large sound fonts up to the x16 the sf2 sound fonts and a lot of ordinary sound fonts you can find on the net only takes a few megabytes like typically two or four or eight or maybe 16 megabytes and here you have 1 Gigabyte the largest font I've seen I think it's BURAN and that is about 60 MB or something. So 1 GB should be plenty of room for for storing fonts. Anyway you only have 8 Banks to store in. Anyway the X16 has a lot of effects this board also of course has a wave table header for connecting it directly to your sound card but it also has a separate line out so that means that if you want to you can connect your speakers directly to the x16 you can also install it externally on the Chill V external MIDI board. The X2 and the X16 does not have any buttons or any ways to externally change the bank on the fly. But you can send so-called nrpn commands directly to those two devices to change the bank you want to use uh directly from dos or from Windows the x16 have dip switches where you can use this but uh when your card is in your computer uh this will be very hard to do and um I'm not sure I would recommend doing that while the power is on we have now covered all five devices so we know what they are and what they are capable of doing so what should you pick up well if you go to mobile games and uh take out a list on games supporting General Media Roland GS or MT32 or CT32L you will see there is a lot of games uh with support for one or more of these standards if you just want a cheap way of playing General MIDI on your old laptop I would go for the S2P it's easy to install ,it works on 386 or betters and there's a few patches for older games if you are using a 8086 or 286. If you want to play play the really early games, especially those from Sierra, you probably want MT32 emulation. And the mt32 Pi Project is as far as I know the best way to get MT32 - if
you don't have the original Hardware. So if you pick up the MP32L or the WP32 McCake you will get real or as close as possible to real MT32. It will also give you CM32L and with those two covered you will be able to play a lot of games the way the developers intended you to listen to their music. But the mt32 Pi project also has excellent support for GM and quite good support for Roland GS. So if you go for the MP32L or the WP32 you will have a very all around high quality MIDI synthesizer and it will give you all the options you will need to play games from the 80s and the '90s. Then we have the two Dream Blasters; The X2 and X16 with or without licensed Roland GS. If you
are buying a MIDI to play DOS games go for the GS version. You want to use the licensed Roland GS samples that was the way most game developers intended you to listen to the game music. it also has excellence General MIDI and you can upload your sound fonts for the version of General MIDI you prefer. Should you choose X16 or the X2. Well if you're really into MIDI and you have a lot of favorites (sound fonts) and you need to have them easily accessible, then go for the x16 because it has 8 Banks. It also has more sound effects but as far as I know it will not help you for DOS gaming.
That was a lot of talking on my side. I think I've covered everything. Now very quick summarize: By the MP32L or the X2 GS Second Edition, or both of them. If you have both of them you will have a great solution for DOS gaming. Well that was my take on this. I hope you saw the
whole video. It's a quite a long one and I hope you liked it, and if you did please press Like and Subscribe, that will help me a lot. Thank you for watching.
2025-01-15 19:23