How to output to USB?

[garyg]

With the help of kind people at Amiga.org I was able to get WinUAE running under Windows 7 virtualization on my Macbook Pro.

Although I have several Amigas around the house (an A4000/060 working fine; an A4000/040 with Amiga Mediator that I can't manage to get Picasso96 to run the Voodoo 3 graphics card at any decent speed); an A4000/060T that I can't get to boot any more after installing more memory; and an A1200/040T that a friend gave me that I can't get to book except from an external HD) I have to prepare for the day that I don't have a working Amiga.

At present my main use of my A4000/060 is for MIDI (Bars & Pipes Professional, Triple Play Plus MIDI interface, etc.)

I was attracted to WinUAE when I read that MIDI output was enabled, but...does anyone know if MIDI output can be sent through my MacBook Pro's USB port? If so, I'll consider buying a USB MIDI interface and testing it out

[thomas]

First thing to find out is whether the "Windows 7 virtualization on my Macbook Pro" is able to send output "through [your] MacBook Pro's USB port". Is it? If it isn't, then there is nothing WinUAE can do about it.

[garyg]

True enough, but I need positive answers to both: for WinUAE to pass the data to the virtualization and the virtualization to pass through the data to the USB port. My fear is that WinUAE users will say "Well, I don't have any experience with virtualization of Windows so I can't say" and that Parallels, the virtualization company, will say the same about WinUAE.

I set WinUAE to recognize a USB device but when I view it in Diskmaster it only sees the pre-installed (and uneraseable) Windows utility files on the drive, not the files present on the drive that I loaded there. I've asked in the Parallels forum if I need to tweak the USB prefs settings somehow (narrowing my question to just this issue, not one of sending data to the USB port)

[Amiga1992]

I think it should work, but you will be in pain with the latency that this will bring. USB MIDI interfaces are not as smooth as a good old serial one.

I can try connecting my Akai MPD24 to my computer and see if WinUAE recoggnizes it as a MIDI I/O device. I'll post again when I do so. I cant help with virtualization though

[garyg]

Is it perhaps significant that my USB port is 2.0? I see some old comments on Google about this subject but they seem to refer to older, slower hardware configurations and USB MIDI interface manufacturers seem to be aware of the potential problem:
http://www.emu.com/products/product.asp?product=15185

The MIDI standard of 31250 bits/second isn't very fast by modern standards

[garyg]

Just for the heck of it I loaded a piano sequence that was already in my hard file and played it just to see if Bars&Pipes Pro (or the entire Amiga emulation) would crash for lack of a place for the serial output to go. To my amazement it not only played but piano music came out of my MacBook Pro's speakers, despite the fact that the sequence didn't even contain the program number (zero) for "grand piano" (on a real Amiga I don't use the General MIDI program map but just connect the channels with pianos exclusively to a piano module).

As best I can figure somewhere in Windows 7 it knew to send the data to QuickTime or a browser's MIDI plug-in (for security reasons I have any link to the web on the Windows side directed to my Mac browser, Safari).

Does anyone have an explanation?

[Toni Wilen]

Some answers even if I am not sure what are you exactly trying to do..

Serial port data is simply dropped ("cable not connected" mode) if emulated serial port is not configured.

Serial emulation includes simple hack: all data is redirected to MIDI Out (if configured) if Amiga's internal serial port data rate is set to standard MIDI rate.

Emulation does not care if port is USB or normal serial, anything that is "serial port"-like are supported. ("real", USB, bluetooth virtual, whatever)

[garyg]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Some answers even if I am not sure what are you exactly trying to do..

Serial port data is simply dropped ("cable not connected" mode) if emulated serial port is not configured.

Serial emulation includes simple hack: all data is redirected to MIDI Out (if configured) if Amiga's internal serial port data rate is set to standard MIDI rate.

Emulation does not care if port is USB or normal serial, anything that is "serial port"-like are supported. ("real", USB, bluetooth virtual, whatever)

Thanks again, Toni. The last sentence is most interesting. There's a standard Bars & Pipes Pro "MIDI OUT" tool that one places at the end of each track in a Bars & Pipes Pro sequences. There are also modified tools for their Triple Play and Triple Play Plus multiport MIDI interfaces to allow up to 112 chanels (some of my sequences have 50 channels and use the three MIDI ports connected to the Amiga serial port; there can be three additional MIDI ports connected through the One Stop Music Shop sound card).

Some technical detail is here: http://www.hansfaust.de/barsnpipes/tpp/MAINE.html