this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Sound cards used to take up one of the few slots so they’d also have a joystick port since the people buying sound cards were often doing it for games.
I remember buying the Sound Blaster card and “upgrading” my ram for a pretty penny so I could play wing commander.
Worth every penny.
100%
First game I had that came on CD, first time I'd seen a PDF (instruction manual)
It was also the MIDI port, so it made sense.
Oh shit th CD drive connection! If you didn't plug that in, Audio CDs wouldn't have any sound.
Soundblaster.
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.
Creative Soundblaster AWE 32
I might still have one or two of those in a box somewhere...
Did joysticks actually use MIDI or they just use the same port? You can program so many buttons with MIDI. You could set up an entire cockpit on one device.
They were separate hardware protocols. Thanks to the pinout, the port would get used in different ways depending on what's plugged in. In theory you could have both midi in/out devices and a joystick plugged in at the same time.
More here: https://www.mikesflightdeck.com/interfacing/gameport.html
That's nifty. If I understand this, the advantage of a joystick using game port instead of MIDI is much simpler hardware. The game port seems like a sort of ADC which means the joystick needs only very simple analog components. A midi joystick would need those same analog components, plus its own ADCs and some digital logic for midi comms. Without the need in most games for dozens of axes and buttons, the extra cost and complexity wouldn't be worth it.
I did find this though, if someone has midi stuff and wanted to go wild. https://github.com/c0redumb/midi2vjoy
That's the gist of it, yes. Consider that the most silicon peripherals of the time had were things like shift registers in NES controllers. The rest was all switches and pots (joystick), the latter of which had to be calibrated every time you fired up a game.
In another timeline, embracing MIDI in the 80's and 90's for game controllers would have been amazing. I feel like Japan would have really run wild with something like that.
Do you know how that compares to USB today? I assume those need ADCs and some sort of digital logic, which overall is similar to midi. I assume that whatever USB is doing is much simpler though, still making midi more expensive. Maybe not though, and we're missing out on some crazy joysticks?
I know enough to be dangerous.
Basically we live in a silicon rich world compared to back then. Your vision of putting the ADC circuits in the peripheral is exactly what's done now with every game controller on the market. And no, USB is technically much more complicated since MIDI is just a serial data protocol whereas USB is a full-on bidirectional packet network. Yet silicon-wise, it's kind of same-y since the guts of these devices are one or two purpose-built chips for either USB or MIDI. Heck, they even use the same number of wires!
If you're wondering why MIDI devices today seem expensive despite rocking a 40+ year old communication standard, its because the cost is in everything else. As far as I understand, musical instruments (and anything else in that ecosystem) need rich, repeatable, and reliable tactile input with a decent duty cycle. They often need to be roadworthy, or put up with being run hard in a studio. But also there has always been kind of a premium attached to music stuff in general. Maybe lower production numbers of devices compared to game consoles? Maybe they're mostly professional or "prosumer" goods? I honestly never understood the big picture here.
Also, there's a trend of musicians going back to "control voltage" style synths, which is basically analog signal processing from the 70's and earlier (e.g. Moog). And feature-for-feature, that stuff is even more expensive. Go figure.
I mean, people have demolished Dark Souls using a Guitar Hero guitar, and also using MIDI drumkits. So there's that. Anything's possible with the right silicon glue in play.
Ha, those are crazy. I was thinking of something with tons of buttons and axes. It looks like people are making those though https://www.svg.com/113674/untold-story-insane-game-controller-ever-made/
I mean the MIDI port was where you would plug in a MIDI keyboard, which is just a fancy joypad anyways. So I guess they did use it. I don't think it supports any other protocol.