Trials with Alesis Serial driver

Posted by Riccardo on September 22, 1998 at 02:03:08:

I want to tell you my experience with my new QS7 connected via serial cable to a portable computer
because I think it can be useful to someone.
At first the things seems very straight: connect the cable, set QS7 to PC 38.4, set GenMIDI on, install the
driver in Win98, double click on a .MID and it plays !
Wonderful.
But I noticed a problem with some MIDI files: there
were some notes or tracks out of tune.
Finally I found that lowering the driver speed from
115 k (default) to 38.4 everything remains in tune.
Then I tried to record MIDI tracks but nothing seems
to come to the keyboard. Dumping SYSEX data into FreeLOADER showed few bytes incoming then it stopped.
I resolved it increasing the Input Persistance
parameter from 0 (default) to 150, altough I have a
Pentium 133 with the 16550 serial chip, presented in
the readme.txt file as the optimum.
I tried a lot of values and this is the minimum that works fine.

I would like to test the Roland driver to see if it
simpler or at least more coherent, but I read in its
readme file that for most PC it must be connected at
31.25, that is the MIDI serial clock !?!.

Hope it can be useful to someone.

Riccardo Massarin

Follow Ups:

• Re: Trials with Alesis Serial driver (try new Roland driver) Dan Halbert 9/22/98 (0)