HP Vectra Workstation & Roland MT-32 MIDI box

Today’s “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old, or Obsolete Device” is a 2-for-1 deal: the mighty Hewlett-Packard Vectra VL workstation and the incredible Roland MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module!

The Vectra VL was once one of HP’s high-end “WinTel” desktop workstations. Primarily designed to run Microsoft hashtag#Windows NT and/or Windows 98, this beefy tower includes a Matrox Millennium GPU and is powered by a 450MHz Pentium II processor - the fastest chip ever released in the PII family. Although it was obviously intended for more serious pursuits, I’ve found that it’s a really solid late ‘90s gaming rig, able to run classics like Quake, Carmegeddon, and Descent beautifully.

However, the real star of this show is the slim black box tucked under the display: the Roland Corporation U.S. MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module! Back in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, game developers had to create music for a wide variety of playback scenarios: the lo-fi PC “beeper” speaker, PC’s with AdLib or Sound Blaster cards, a huge range of gaming consoles with different (and often incompatible) sound chips, etc.

To make development easier and more consistent, many game soundtrack composers adopted the Roland MT-32 synthesizer box seen here, which created a sort of “game music standard” all by itself. As a result, some of the biggest game publishers of the era started including support for the MT-32 in their games - perhaps none more than Sierra On-Line, who integrated it into their popular “Quest” franchises (Space Quest, King’s Quest, Police Quest, etc.).

Getting the Zscaler text on the MT-32 screen was actually quite challenging! The display on the MT-32 is mainly intended for showing which instruments or sounds are being triggered at any moment, so to get this arbitrary text to display, I had to really dig into the deepest recesses of some ancient forum threads (shout-out to the fine folks at the Internet Archive for preserving this stuff!). I eventually found a process that worked:

• Figure out the maximum length of a message (the MT-32 has no ability to scroll text)

• Convert the text into a very specific form of hexadecimal which the MT-32 can interpret as system commands (aka “SysEx messages,” using a long-dead calculator tool which I found in an archive.org asset bundle

• Locate a working copy of a rather obscure Windows app called “SYSEX32” and install it on the PC

• Use SYSEX32 to transmit the newly-created SysEx commands to the MT-32 via the Joystick/MIDI port on my Sound Blaster card

• Success!
  
  That’s it for today - happy Friday do you all!
  
  PS You’ll definitely want to turn sound on when you watch this clip 😉