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I have only messed with midi virtually so don't know much beyond the bit packing. But when you go to actual hardware and cables is there not a rigid speed it should be running at. 30Kbaud or something. That is, why is the interface running too fast and crashing the synth? the synth(no matter how old and limited) should handle the specified 30Kbaud stream all day long.

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Not necessarily. The RTS/CTS pins on the serial port are there for the device to tell the host "stop sending data, I need to process the data already sent"

The reason this doesn't work is that USB adapters don't have those pins, and thus assume you can send it at 30kbaud - not respecting when the device says it must pause sending data.

By introducing a static flow rate below what the CPU can handle, it should theoretically keep the flow rate below the threshold that the CPU starts to choke at

MIDI doesn't have RTS/CTS pins...

Well that's on me for assuming :/ I assumed that it did, based on it being explained in the blog post

dezgeg is correct, MIDI has no hardware flow control pins. The synth's serial receiver chokes because the 8-bit CPU takes too long to write the SysEx buffer to SRAM.

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