midi on the sega saturn

[sneex]

anyone tried the midi on the saturn? i just ordered "saturn music school" for the saturn which includes the midi cable. i'm very excited... but i hear that it's made by wakka; a company that apparently made a crappy sequencer for the dreamcast (o.to.i.r.e or something like that). anyone know anything about midi on the saturn? i won't bother asking all of the other questions i have about it 'till i know someone has any clue about it. i'm lazy (but i did try to find anything i could out on google first). thanks.


oh, and lawrence; is it you who owns the samsung saturn?

[Lawrence]

Yeah, I have a samsung saturn - and a saturn music school.  =)

[sneex]

I don't know much kanji, so this'll take me a while to figure out. Do you know of any other ways to use the midi connector on the saturn? How does the saturn dev unit midi differ? You should let me buy your samsung saturn.

[Lawrence]

The Saturn serial port is just two serial ports on a single connector.  The MIDI adaptor does nothing more than convert Saturn serial to MIDI serial (MIDI is just a serial port after all).  The dev Saturns just have a cable connected to the ports, since the Saturn serial port connector was probably rare and/or expensive at the time.

No.

[sneex]

Does the midi only control pcm sounds or does it also control the playing of raw wav sounds too? This game's pcm sounds are so shrill it hurts my ears! There is no way panzer dragoon saga's soundtrack uses pcm. Does it? I want to be able to tap into the effects like reverb and all that too.  

[Akir]

Hey, don't diss PCM. It powered virtually every retro console out there.

[Guest]

I guess there's nothing wrong with pcm at all. It's really what even the highest-end sampler uses. But the difference is in the quality of the samples and the fact that they use pitch region samples (removing artifacts), giving a smooth sound.

[Aidan]

Oddly enough, CDs use PCM.

On the topic of 'high end' samplers - actually these days just about all wavetable systems use multiple samples - there's more to it than simply using several samples to remove artifacts. Many instruments have changes in the harmonics generated at different pitches. These changes are across the duration of the note, from the attack phase all the way through to the release phase. By using multiple samples (and a few other tricks), it's possible to have a pretty accurate representation of the harmonics that colour the notes.