OK. Once upon a time (early '90’s) there was a nifty music notation program called Music Printer Plus, written by Jack Jarrett and Gary Barber and marketed by an outfit called Temporal Acuity Products in Bellevue, Washington. In addition to making nice musical notation, the program could “play back” the notated music through a handful of sound cards, one of which was the LAPC-1 card by Roland. I got good results with this combination for several years but then got distracted by other interests.
Time passes and after several computer upgrades during which I made no attempt to reinstall the program or the outdated sound card, my interest has been renewed in the files I created (and archived) at the time. Some problems have arisen. The LAPC-1 is ISA architecture and not Plug-and-Pray. After casting about in the compter boneyard I finally found an old motherboard with ISA slots. powered it up and installed Win98SE (the O/S with which I used the card 'way back when.) The card is “MPU-401” compatable, but I am not having any success getting it installed. Roland obviously doesn’t support this card any longer and I can’t find any drivers or installation help on the net. The little that Google finds for me isn’t getting the job done, not helped by the fact that my card has some physical differences (in the way the “interrupt” is selected) from the documentation I CAN find about it.
I can RUN the MPP program from my archived files but when I attempt to enter the playback mode I get a “MIDI device not functional” type error. If I attempt a new INSTALL of the program (version 4.1H from the original factory disks) on this HDD, it hangs up about midway through. Temporal Acuity Products seems to be no longer in business and Messers. Jarrett and Barber seem to have disappeared.
I think if I can get the LAPC-1 installed correctly this may work. Is there some kind soul in Dopeland that has experience with this combination of ingredients that can help me get my groove back?
Pointers toward MPP/LAPC-1 users/support groups would be helpful. TIA