[FancyCat]

First of all, new to the forum here, so hello everyone!

Now... looking around my room I see that I can afford to sell a few things and scrape together the extra cash to buy an old Roland MT-32 off of eBay... since this site has thus far been my number one choice for PC retro-gaming, I figure this is as good a place to ask as any. I'm hoping not to spend more than $150 or so on this project, which is why I have a few questions about connecting it to my PC...

My retro-gaming system is a IBM 300GL with a 2gb HD, a CDROM, 64mb of RAM, and runs DOS 6.22 as it's OS with Win 3.11 installed for GUI stuff and certain games. The soundcard is some generic that came in the PC as far as I know, but it works just fine in Soundblaster compatible mode, and it has a gameport...

Now, I read on several websites on how to connect an MT-32 and I got very confused. One site talked about MPU-401 cards and LAPC-I's and SCC's and made the project sound very expensive and not practical for my purposes (as I imagine they're all ISA cards). Others suggested buying a MIDI-to-USB cable, but that isn't going to work because I'm connecting to a pure DOS system, which though it HAS a USB connection, isn't going to work in DOS.

What I'm HOPING to do is to connect the MT-32 to my Soundblaster compatible card's gameport via a MIDI-to-Gameport cable, but some sites seemed to suggest this wouldn't produce TRUE MT-32 output and would just play General MIDI through it... so does anyone out there have an MT-32 connected to an old system and could give me some ideas here? Keep in mind I haven't bought anything yet, I'm just trying to get an idea of how much of a headache this is going to be...