No MIDI i/o on A7N8X-E

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cauley Felps
  • Start date Start date
C

Cauley Felps

I'm having trouble getting any MIDI sent or received from an A7N8X-E
board under XPProSP1.

On the last try I had gone and gotten all the latest NVidea drivers,
the newest bios and DX9.0c, and it still didn't work. Windows sees it
and has installed it's standard MPU401 driver and all my apps see it,
but I get nothing. I even tried an older version of the NV stuff, but
it didn't help.

Are there any known issues with the MIDI in and out stuff on this
board, and/or has anyone here successfully used it with external
hardware?

Please reply in the newsgroup

and Thanks!

PS- FWIW, the bracket is a home-brewed 15 pin sub on a PCI slot cover
using only the 4 MIDI lines (5,8,12,15) and no joystick lines. I've
checked the wiring twice with a volt meter. Everything is going to the
correct pins on the ribbon with no shorts and I get the proper 5 volts
DC between pin 5&8. I'll check the 15 pin to MIDI adapter again
tomorrow in another machine to rule that out, but I'm pretty sure that
wouldn't have died on me.
 
Cauley Felps said:
I'm having trouble getting any MIDI sent or received from an A7N8X-E
board under XPProSP1.

On the last try I had gone and gotten all the latest NVidea drivers,
the newest bios and DX9.0c, and it still didn't work. Windows sees it
and has installed it's standard MPU401 driver and all my apps see it,
but I get nothing. I even tried an older version of the NV stuff, but
it didn't help.

Are there any known issues with the MIDI in and out stuff on this
board, and/or has anyone here successfully used it with external
hardware?

Please reply in the newsgroup

and Thanks!

PS- FWIW, the bracket is a home-brewed 15 pin sub on a PCI slot cover
using only the 4 MIDI lines (5,8,12,15) and no joystick lines. I've
checked the wiring twice with a volt meter. Everything is going to the
correct pins on the ribbon with no shorts and I get the proper 5 volts
DC between pin 5&8. I'll check the 15 pin to MIDI adapter again
tomorrow in another machine to rule that out, but I'm pretty sure that
wouldn't have died on me.
Click to expand...

My P4C800-E has the bracket. The DB-15 connector has numbers
printed in the plastic. The DB-15 is shown on the left. The
2x8 ribbon cable connector is on the right. The wire with the
red coloring on it, is on the right of both these connectors,
marking pin 1. Using an ohmmeter, and looking into the end
of the two connectors, this is the correspondence between
the numbers printed in the plastic, and the pins on the
ribbon cable. This diagram is looking into the ends of
both connectors. (If you imagine, in your mind's eye, the
ribbon female being flipped downward, to connect to the
header, the signals go "straight thru".)

DB-15 female Ribbon female
___________________________ 10 9
\ 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 / X X X X X X X
\ 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 / X X X X X X X X
----------------------- 2 1

The following info is from the manual. The letter H is
used to mark each header pin. Pin 16 is missing and corresponds
to the blocked pin on the ribbon female. I've overlayed the
pin number correspondence from the figure above.

+5V J1B2 J1CY GND GND J1CX J1B1 +5V
2 1
GAME1 H H H H H H H H
H H H H H H H
^ 10 9
|
MIDI_IN J2B2 J2CY MIDI_OUT J2CX J2B1 +5V

The male MIDI/game connector pinout is shown on this page, and
the pin order seems to agree with the Asus way of
doing things. Again, you have to rotate this in your mind
until it mates with the female DB-15 connector above.

http://www.epanorama.net/documents/joystick/pc_joystick.html

Joystick B ____ Joystick A
/ |
/ |
/ |
/ 1 |
| O------- 5 Volt
5 Volt -------O |
| 9 2 |
| O------- Button
Button -------O |
| 10 3 |
| O------- Resistor X-axis
Resistor X-axis -------O |
| 11 4 |
| O------- Ground
MIDI TXD -------O |
| 12 5 |
| O------- Ground
Resistor Y-axis -------O |
| 13 6 |
| O------- Resistor Y-axis
Button -------O |
| 14 7 |
| O------- Button
MIDI RXD -------O |
| 15 8 |
| O------- 5 Volt
\ |
\ |
\ |
\ |
\__|


This page seems to agree with your use of only 5,8,12,15.

http://www.junkroom.freeserve.co.uk/sbmidi2.htm

The BIOS has a MIDI I/O address setting and IRQ choice.
Check that MIDI is not disabled there.

This posting on nforcershq.com, mentions an error in the
Nforce2 reference design. I have no idea whether this
applies to your board - the A7N8X-E was developed late
enough, that this error could easily have been fixed.
This particular posting is about an Epox board, and
fixed a midi-in problem. The second posting suggests
it won't be a problem on your board.

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32280
http://nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32279&highlight=nforce2+midi+port

And this thread implies midi-in works on your board:
http://groups.google.ca/[email protected]

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything more specific
to your problem.

HTH,
Paul
 
Cauley Felps said:
I'm having trouble getting any MIDI sent or received from an A7N8X-E
board under XPProSP1.

On the last try I had gone and gotten all the latest NVidea drivers,
the newest bios and DX9.0c, and it still didn't work. Windows sees it
and has installed it's standard MPU401 driver and all my apps see it,
but I get nothing. I even tried an older version of the NV stuff, but
it didn't help.

Are there any known issues with the MIDI in and out stuff on this
board, and/or has anyone here successfully used it with external
hardware?

Please reply in the newsgroup

and Thanks!

PS- FWIW, the bracket is a home-brewed 15 pin sub on a PCI slot cover
using only the 4 MIDI lines (5,8,12,15) and no joystick lines. I've
checked the wiring twice with a volt meter. Everything is going to the
correct pins on the ribbon with no shorts and I get the proper 5 volts
DC between pin 5&8. I'll check the 15 pin to MIDI adapter again
tomorrow in another machine to rule that out, but I'm pretty sure that
wouldn't have died on me.
Click to expand...

Also, looking at the iteusa.com SuperI/O chips, they seem to have
a MPU-401 midi interface built-in, so I don't understand how
the Nforce2 chipset gets involved in this. While no datasheet
is available for the ITE8708F, many of the other products in
the same family have MPU-401. Maybe the issues woth Nforce2 had
to do with IRQs or something.

Paul
 
Paul,

Thanks a lot for all the info! The pinouts you list for the
motherboard end of the cable look like what I went with, which is from
page 2-27 in the manual. (MIDI IN is the first pin after the missing
one in the corner, then you skip two joystick pins and then MIDI OUT).
And I know the power and ground are OK (even at the 15pin end).

I ran into that resistor thread when I was looking too, but it didn't
look like it was for my board, plus I wasn't getting an output either.
I have a weird feeling these pins aren't putting anything out. If the
15pin to MIDI adapter does work on another machine, I may either quit
or check the pins on a scope (if I can figure out what I'm looking
for) and compare them.

I've got a handful of PCI SB clones, but the ASUS machine is pretty
full "card-wise", including some nice heat generating DSP cards. I'm
trying to keep the little bit of space that I've still got between
them. I started with USB MIDI, but didn't find it 100% reliable, then
I read some bad things about my particular interface's MIDI timing.

Here's another weird nforcershq thread

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=57833

It points to the nForce 3.13 drivers (the old ones I tried)

I did not, however, try changing the address or IRQ in the bios. It
showed up correctly in the device manager at the default 330/10. May
be worth a try.

- Take Care
George
 
Paul said:
Also, looking at the iteusa.com SuperI/O chips, they seem to have
a MPU-401 midi interface built-in, so I don't understand how
the Nforce2 chipset gets involved in this. While no datasheet
is available for the ITE8708F, many of the other products in
the same family have MPU-401. Maybe the issues woth Nforce2 had
to do with IRQs or something.
Click to expand...

I haven't followed this thread and don;t ahve it all, so hopefully I'm
not going over covered ground.

I seem to recall that it was an issue with the soundstorm and the base
address? But I could be completely wrong. All I really recall was that
you had to use the MIDI on the soundstorm, and not on an external card,
although if you can change the base address on the external card, I see
no reason why it shouldn't work.

Good luck with this one.

Ben
 
FWIW-

I tried some other crap with this setup and still got nothing-

- The 15 pin to MIDI adapter has now been checked on another machine
and still works fine.

- Pinouts of the IDC ribbon to 15 pin connector that I'm using with
the ASUS have been re-checked several times (only 4 wires used)

- MIDI IRQ and address have been switched from default (MPU-401 is
still recognized and installs fine).

- A wide variety of NVidea and ASUS drivers have been tried

- Most recently a reformat and clean Win2K install with SP4 and all
the ASUS stuff (I was using XP). I really don't think it's software. I
get no input or output (in several MIDI apps).

- I also tried reversing the MIDI in and out connections at the D-Sub
just in case they made a typo, but it didn't help.

I guess I'll go back to USB for now, but if anyone ever gets a
convenient opportunity to check the MIDI in and out pins on one of
those brackets against what they list in the manual, please let me
know here.

-Take Care
 
All I really recall was that you had to use the MIDI on the soundstorm,
and not on an external card,
Click to expand...

Ben,

Thanks! No, the external card was just an option that I figured would
obviously work, but my machine is already too full of PCI cards and I
wanted to use the built-in stuff. I had been using a USB MIDI
interface, but I don't trust it and would like to have the regular
ASUS circuit as an option or replacement.

Switching the address and IRQ was just to see if it helped. The bios
only gave me one other pair of settings for that and they didn't work
either.

Paul mentioned that one of the "non-NForce" chips has an MPU401
circuit. I'm hoping the pin junction on the board is for the same
MIDI/Game circuit that was detected by Windows.

I'm thinking maybe if I hook a full ribbon cable to the MB connector
and plug it into one of those protoboard things, I can swap lines
around and find a couple pins that are carrying the signal if they're
on there.

-Take Care

PS- Wouldn't it be fun if after all this junk, I discover that I just
have a "dud" MIDI circuit on my board and it wouldn't have worked with
anybody's bracket.
 
Cauley said:
Ben,

Thanks! No, the external card was just an option that I figured would
obviously work, but my machine is already too full of PCI cards and I
wanted to use the built-in stuff. I had been using a USB MIDI
interface, but I don't trust it and would like to have the regular
ASUS circuit as an option or replacement.

Switching the address and IRQ was just to see if it helped. The bios
only gave me one other pair of settings for that and they didn't work
either.

Paul mentioned that one of the "non-NForce" chips has an MPU401
circuit. I'm hoping the pin junction on the board is for the same
MIDI/Game circuit that was detected by Windows.

I'm thinking maybe if I hook a full ribbon cable to the MB connector
and plug it into one of those protoboard things, I can swap lines
around and find a couple pins that are carrying the signal if they're
on there.
Click to expand...

OK, I think I missed quite a bit of the conversation!

If you have an A7N8X-E (non deluxe) then I guess you will be using the
ITE8708F chip on the board to do the MIDI stuff, and hopefully the
problem I mentioned earlier won't appear. But since it's a problem, who
knows which nForce2 southbridges (with or without soundstorm) it appears in.

Again, good luck with it.

Ben
 
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