Roland S-MPU/AT breakout box

Miscellaneous
1

While I wait for my PCBs from SmashTV to arrive, I’ve got a few other backburner projects that I’m tackling. Here’s an odd little box I picked up from a pawn shop for $3… Figured it had to be useful for something:

This is a breakout interface for an original Roland S-MPU/AT ISA MIDI card. Unfortunately I don’t have the card so at the moment it is not doing me much good. It connects to the card via this 8-pin mini-DIN:

Does anyone have a pinout for that DIN plug or know where I might find one? There doesn’t seem to be much info online. I figure, seeing as most PC soundcards of the ISA era had a MIDI implementation based on Roland’s reference design, I should be able to adapt this to a DB15 connector easily and then I could use it as an interface for my classic Gravis Ultrasound PnP. The only hitch is, I don’t know how much extra logic control this thing has in it, seeing as it has 2xIn and 2xOut and the old style soundcard cables generally were just 1x1->DB15. Any ideas on this?

2

Open it up and post a picture of the pcb inside (top and bottom) - then we can help you figure it out

3

Ask and ye shall receive!

Heh, I already had those. I just figured no one other than me would want to see them. :wink:

4

Humm, apart from what appears to be an optocoupler (the white sharp ic) and an inverter ic (74ls05), theres no hidden gold on the PCB…

But you can recycle the box, the cable and the MIDI ports, just cut the traces and solder wires directly to the pins on the backside, might come in handy for a future MIDIbox project of yours :slight_smile:

Many greets,

Peter

5

Yeah, I could part it out, but I was hoping I could use it as an interface box for an old soundcard in its original form… By swapping out the data cable for a DB15 one or whatever. I have so many assorted components around that I’d hate to break up something complete.