it has all sortsa knobs and stuff i usually never use haha. would this work, nordloef? not sure how the knobs even work to be honest lol, but theyre there. it also has a channel selector that i would think could be used to go back and forth between say square 1 and 2, which i could program beforehand to sound to my liking. that combined with the fact that i can duty cycle with the mod wheel would be sufficient. . i don't ever need (so far) more than two instrument sounds per song.

@rushcoil, i am trying to avoid having to buy anything extra, like a trition or akai. esp cuz tritons are expensive. getting a cheap netbook was my fallback like you said. but id still rather not spend any extra money than i need to. plus using soley NES's - significantly cooler haha.

And of course you can play along with the MidiNES simultaneously, but you will need to change the global output of your controller to the appropriate channel (1-pulse, 2-pulse, 3-tri, 4-noise, 5-wav) and you will obviously have to reserve one of these channels for your live playing if you're using only one MidiNES. Of course you have two of these, so I assume you'd use one for live playing and just run MIDI on the other one.

If you want to playback MIDI and do all of this from one controller using one MidiNES, you are going to have to have a workstation of some sort so you can save the MIDI tracks / CC data. Something like a Triton. You could import your MIDI files to any workstation and direct them to use your MIDI out, and send it to the MidiNES, and that is a complex but workable non-laptop solution. Or you could run your MIDI tracks from a standalone unit (like an Akai MPC500 from what I understand) and plug your controller IN to the Akai so you can still send MIDI data OUT of the Akai to your MidiNES from your controller.

Or get a little Asus Eee netbook. It is powerful enough to run MIDI on a basic DAW and allow you to have all of these presets and MIDI files stored and ready to fire.