DOS Programming of MIDI interface (MPU401 UART)

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Posted by Petr Zamek on May 04, 2001 at 09:56:27:


I have an old PC386 Win3.1 with ESS1868 16 PnP connected to MIDI-keyboard CASIO CTK651.
Problem 1: I wanted to test, how to communicate in C-language for DOS thru MIDI interface and wrote a simple test programm for communication in UART MODE. The MIDI-commands I'm sending are played on the connected external MIDI-keyboard CASIO, not on the internal sound generator in ESS-card.
I wonder, how to choose, whichone of the sound generators should be used. The selection must be possible, because in MIDI-mapper under Win3.1 I can choose for every channel where it plays (ESS1868 or MIDI OUTPUT PORT).
Problem 2: I wrote some programm which chatches the BulkDump sent from CASIO (function "Bulksend") and stores it in a file. In the generated data are many (255) sequences System Exclusive (F0...F7), - most of them containing the same: almost all zeros. I do not understand this internal Casio-data,
but they may contain the selections made originally on the keyboard. When I choose the function "receive" on the keyboard and my program sends all this data back to CASIO, the function "receive" is terminated to early (maybe after the first occurence of F7). How can I restore all the bulk data? Should I concatenate the data in one large (about 60KB) block (F0...F7)?
Petr

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