Getting MIDI to Work on an OASys IPAD...

[jdmcs]

Fellow Tinkerers, I have bought one of those DOOM-playing "bump bars". And not content to simply playing DOOM, I want to get MIDI out to work.

Since the bump bar was never designed for MIDI out, I have a MIDICloud RS-232 from Serdashop so that I can attempt to use one of the serial ports for MIDI out.

And I've already run into the first problem: At least with MS-DOS 6.22, I can't get EMM386 or QEMM to work properly - one of these extended memory managers is required to run SoftMPU, which itself (or a similar program) is required to redirect MIDI output on port 330 to a serial port.

No matter which settings I tried, if I let EMM386/QEMM load, then as soon as autoexec.bat starts to run, I get the error Invalid Command Interpreter. It would seem as if these products are potentially stomping on memory used by something else...

Has anyone attempted what I am now attempting? And does anyone have any suggestions to try in order to get EMM386 or QEMM to load properly?

Note: I am not opposed to trying FreeDOS. However, I wasn't able to get a FreeDOS installer written onto media that the iPAD would then boot... I only used MS-DOS 6.22 for my first attempt because I already had it installed on a CF card and the IPAD was OK with booting from it using a CF to USB adapter.

 

[jdmcs]

If anyone is interested to review what I did so far, the initial work was dinner on one of my livestreams: https://www.youtube.com/live/ihTtk9-by2A?t=35m0s

 

[Mu0n]

Here are my config.sys settings for when I need to use expanded memory so I can run SoftMPU.

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEMSYS /testmem:off DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE 2048 AUTO

(you can change the number 2048 to your needs - some rare programs complain when I had too much allocated RAM from my 256 mb of available RAM in my weecee).

the same config file also runs well on my 486 with 32 mb of RAM.

 

[jdmcs]

Here are my config.sys settings for when I need to use expanded memory so I can run SoftMPU.

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEMSYS /testmem:off DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE 2048 AUTO

So I forgot to try to load EMM386 high, but the parameters “2048 AUTO” only changed the symptoms slightly. DOS 6.22 was able to finish booting, but I started getting general failed errors on C: after a few disk accesses…

It’s not the disk (it doesn’t happen when I don’t load EMM386). I’m wondering if it’s one of the following:

• An incompatibility between DOS 6.22 and something I can’t change about this board: the SoC, the BIOS (it’s a SeaBIOS), and/or the amount of system RAM (128MB).
• An incompatibility between DOS 6.22 and USB booting the system. (I can try an SD card but only if I find a reliable way to install OS images into it).
• Bad RAM (booting a memory test program could prove problematic).

I’m willing to try FreeDOS and a newer version of MS-DOS, but I’ll need to create the images off-device - the iPAD can’t boot from a USB floppy drive, and I’m not optimistic that CD but is supported.