Category: Music

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The DX7 is fixed :)

Today was the day that the new 74LS374 arrived in the post. My first quick test was to put the new chip into my chip tester, and it confirmed the chip was ok whulst thebold one still reported faulty, so it looks like the chip tester might actually be trustworthy. I’ll be doing some more testing with this in the future as it could be a very handy tool.

Next step, was to get the new IC fitted and see if the issue was resolved. After powering it on i checked all the address lines and everything looked perfect! The welcome message showed up with no corruption and the DX7 was fully functional again 😀

The only thing left to do was test it out with a talented musician at the keys. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one, so you’ll have to put up with this!

Musical talents aside. I’m pretty happy with this repair, the DX7 is a great piece of music history, and it’s really nice to see it fully functional again.

I can add vintage synthesiser repair to my resume now 🫠

Unfortunately the DX7 has now got to go back to its owner, maybe I need to set up another watch list on eBay 🤔

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Roland MT-32

Back in the days of DOS-based games and mainly point-and-click adventures, when you set up a game you had to choose your soundcard. Most people had a Soundblaster Compatible, some had the Adlib soundcard. However, there was also an option of the MT-32 or MPU401. I didn’t know anyone who had one of these and for good reason, they cost around £500 back in 1987 when they were released. I remember paying around £50 for a Soundblaster card and CD-ROM drive so the cost difference was quite substantial!

So what made it so special? Will the MT-32 is a MIDI Device that was connected to your PC via an MPU-401 hardware interface. This gave your computer access to the audio hardware that most of these tunes were actually written on back then. Songs like the theme tune to Monkey Island were actually composed on the MT-32 and therefore you would get to hear the music exactly like the musician intended it to be heard.

So after seeing some videos about this device, I knew I needed one in my collection, and it really doesn’t disappoint. Listening to Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Simon the sorcerer though this module adds a whole new atmosphere to the games.

I will do a write up on this soon. I will also put up some videos showing it working, and the difference between this and what we had to listen to back then.