MIDI Maze
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Although the most amusing part is that if you wanted more than 4 colors (which was basically any game) you had to use "Low" resolution mode which was only 320 by 200. MIDIMAZE took it a step further and only used about 1/4 of the screen leaving you with only about 160 by 100 of gameplay area. I guess networked multiplayer first person shooters over daisy chained serial lines were pretty heavy duty for machines designed in 1985. :)
Other fun ST facts:
They were huge in early electronic music because they were cheap and had those handy built in MIDI ports. I believe cubase was originally written for the ST.
They have 4 characters buried in their character set that you can assemble into a square and get a picture of "Bob" from Church of the Subgenius fame.
When they had a machine exception, they'd paint little bombs on the left side of the screen, where the number of them indicated the exception type (bus error, 0 divide, etc)
Definitely a spiritual precursor to DOOM on a LAN.
Indeed - the reason I got into electronic music was because I had an ST (and that was part of the reason I got an ST, if you get my meaning). Tried Pro 24, and then got hold of Cubase. Used to spend hours improvising music using it, using muting via the F-keys. Rock solid setup, just worked and was dead easy and quick to use. Amazingly it translates to the version in use today - I used to show it to my pupils (via an ST emulator) to show them how what they were using had a history going back 20+ years.
I wonder how different the musical landscape would have been without MIDI ports being built into the ST. Yes, of course, you can buy an interface, but if it's already there...
Earlier on, they used a mushroom cloud icon, but that was not well received apparently.
Speaking of networked games, there was a racing game called Hover Sprint which allowed 16 players over MIDI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy90R039b1g
Lastly (just for geek wow really) a guy called Douglas Little has written a POC of Doom for the STE (as well as Quake II for the Falcon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCvx2O5M69E
> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software, under the title Faceball 2000. [snip] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It was thought it did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - thus seven such adapters would have been needed for a 16 player experience.
And three months ago I had a nice discussion with one of the people responsible for the Game Gear version:
Until I see it played with real hardware, I am without an ounce of shame, saying it doesn’t work.
The Game Boy has many unsubstantiated information repeated ad nauseum so I’m limping this fabled sixteen player mode with that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100509163809/http://fb2k.retro...
It always surprises me when people say that :)
The thing is, background MIDI on web pages was sort of an accidental quirk in the history of the protocol. Its primary function has always been its face value; it's literally in the name: Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And that's where MIDI has dominated since its introduction in the 80's.
Which, in some ways, is not for the best, because a better name for the protocol would have been Keyboard-Driven Instrument Interface. MIDI messages (to the extent that they are standardized) aren't good for anything else.
ROLI Seaboard is an example of pushing the protocol to its limits. The original spec didn't have polyphonic pitch bend (so a continuous slide from a minor chord into a major one is not possible); ROLI gets around it by transmitting each note one a different MIDI channel as if it were a separate instrument.
This example is just one limitation, but there are plenty; there's no good (read: standard) way to control a stringed instrument (or its emulation) with MIDI. You can play one note on a guitar in 4 ways (on 4 different strings), but MIDI isn't specced for that. Horns are passable because they are monophonic, but controlling performance aspects is up to the software. Drums get away by assigning different MIDI notes to different ways of playing a drum. Etc.
The thing is, the protocol was made just barely flexible enough that it lasted to these days; and the ability to drive an 80's synth with a controller built today (and connect them all to a modern computer/iPad/etc) is an amazing feature.
Because of that, MIDI underpins all modern digital instruments and music software. And because of that, anyone who makes electronic music is a keyboardist (or at least has a MIDI keyboard). The word MIDI controller pretty much defaults to MIDI keyboard.
Want to really have your mind blown about where MIDI shows up? The shape of the protocol defines the shape of the music. Just like different programming languages encourage different styles, so do musical instruments and their physical interfaces.
And so the absolute majority of electronic music today is written from a keyboardist perspective.
You won't get to hear a minor chord continuously slide into a major one in pretty much any music you hear that was made with digital/software instruments/computers.
Because the piano can't to that.
And because of that, the keyboards can't.
And so the synthesizers don't.
And so MIDI doesn't.
And so nearly all music software, for decades, wouldn't. (Some does, but it's not standard, so no mass adoption.)
And so your music doesn't have it a major chord slide into a minor. Because even if you don't play keyboards, your interface to digital instruments is still a piano roll.
Because MIDI.
I'm really looking forward to MIDI 2.0.
I'm not sure I understand this. I can go into FL Studio right now, add the two chords to the piano roll and set the notes to slide and it works.
Are you implying that composers/producers don't do the slide because of how annoying it is to input via MIDI controller?
FL Slide Notes is a proprietary feature (a creative use of MIDI) that only works with FL Studio Plug-ins[1][2]. The new shiny plugin you got for that fat sound? No note slide for you.
So, this is not a feature you can count on in any DAW, but specific to particular set of plug-ins. (In particular, Live had nothing like that last time I checked, nor did the DAW's I use).
ROLI has a more advanced version of this, but again, the support is limited because it is not standard MIDI.
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>Portamento is a fairly standard feature
On monophonic synthesizers.
There's no standard on how that would work with polyphony (that would be pretty much equivalent to polyphonic pitch bend). With your trick, you'd still need to specify which note goes to which new note with portamento/glide, and there is no standard for that.
The problem is usually worse with analog gear, where oscillators are commonly assigned to keys via a round-robin scheme. So enabling polyphonic portamento means that even if you play the same chord over and over, you'd hear the notes slide! Not quite what you intend.
So while some polyphonic synths have portamento/glide in poly mode, lack of support in the protocol means that it acts unpredictably: you only have control of where the notes are sliding to, as a set.
You can see the problem very clearly, using Behringer Deepmind 6 (6-voice analog with poly portamento) as an example here[1].
At this point, you break out your polyphony into voices, put each voice on its own track / MIDI channel, and pitch bend / portamento that (and record separately, if needed). And then you have the ROLI solution. Which is not compatible with any other MIDI controller.
As I said, MIDI is hackable enough to allow one to do pretty much everything, but it's going to be non-standard. And standards and defaults matter.
For that matter, that's why we have MPE[2], which is an extension of MIDI, but it's very, very new (2018-new).
Regardless of my possibly misguided attempts at defending a 36-year-old spec, I absolutely still agree with you, however, that an improved standard could certainly make having more creative control simpler and easier, requiring fewer "hacks".
Their point wasn't "sliding notes in a chord is 100% impossible, prove me wrong!", their point was that the only reason it's not trivial in the first place is because MIDI is biased towards piano keyboards, and that has had a huge influence on a lot of the music released in the past few decades.
I do agree that it is a potentially limiting influence on the music most readily produced, but for that matter (IMO) so is the traditional adherence to 12-tone equal temperament that is often implicit in how the standard is implemented. It would be nice to have finer control here without having to resort to various hacks, but finer resolution means more bits required to represent a given frequency. Finding a different better way to encode MIDI data that could be used as a standard going into the future is something that I believe requires great consideration and might do well with a significantly different approach (but I don't presume to have given it enough thought to say one way or the other).
MIDI CC messages are a bit more flexible, but you're still limited to "[Channel#] [CCCode] [Value]"
>(not sure if you can do it per-note without hacks)
No can do. But hack it enough, and you get MPE[1], which is finally coming this year.
[1]https://www.midi.org/articles-old/midi-polyphonic-expression...
I owned two Atari STs at the time, so I was always popular at these events.
So, what did James do?