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I was about to purchase a Midines from Wayfar, but read online that Midines may be defunct? Does anyone know the status? I know the order process used to take a long time, but as far as I can tell, Wayfar is still accepting orders?
I know of, and am excited about Chip Maestro but I missed the Kickstarter project and I don't know how long it will be before another batch. That plus Midines seems to be rather mature if I could get my hands on one.
Suggestions?
He is still fufilling orders, but its sorta of a crapshoot. You might be better off waiting for fami, or getting a copy of MGB.
btw midines has some weird midi stuff, and updates are about 7 years late 
I already have sent our my board designs for an ArdunioBoy shield so mGB will be a possibility, I hope, soon! FamiTracker might be ok (I think it has MIDI sync now?) but would be lame for a live show - we really want to try to use the real hardware if we can. So sounds like Chip Maestro is our next best chance. Curious as to what sort of MIDI quirks Midines has?
We can play to the NES without sync - the problem is adding other synths and things. If we wanted the GameBoy and NES to be happy together, that's going to be a potential nightmare for a live show. That plus without sync, the NES would always have to be the lead in.
wouldnt hold your breath for MidiNES man.
i use a powerpak with my NES and i love it, yes the NES is always the lead in, but it dosent take away from anything (in my opinion).
my drummer wears earbuds and i program the noise channel as a metronome so he can play along in sync. plus if your playing a venue that has good sound and good stage monitors, its almost impossible to get lost, but practice makes perfect.
SOme times people sell their MIDINESes here, or you can try eBay too.
wouldnt hold your breath for MidiNES man.
i use a powerpak with my NES and i love it, yes the NES is always the lead in, but it dosent take away from anything (in my opinion).
my drummer wears earbuds and i program the noise channel as a metronome so he can play along in sync. plus if your playing a venue that has good sound and good stage monitors, its almost impossible to get lost, but practice makes perfect.
That is probably what we will have to do, at least for the songs using the NES. Our next album sound is more fitting for live shows, but is also one we may end up using a wider variety of chip-synths (NES, GB, SID, FM). I can sync them all via MIDI...except the NES 
Otherwise, yes, the PowerPak works great! We used it for all the NES sounds off our first album. I think for a live show, I am more inclined to use custom cartridges so we can pull out one cartridge and put another one is for some showey cool points but the principle is the same. One plus to having MIDI support would be when composing. On our last album it wasn't so bad because most of the songs started out as chiptunes first. For our second album, more songs seem to start with something else and we compose the chips around that.
I need to test FamiTracker's MIDI support as if it understood transport commands it would make things easier (better still if it had Rewire or VST support but I'm not good enough to implement that and beggars can't be choosers .
As an aside, I dunno what you use for output, but I made an op-amp output board to bypass the noisy on-board output (which goes right past the PPU and picks up a ton of noise) that really improved the cleanliness of the audio. More info as well as the schematic and board layout can be found here. The second iteration, though SMD, can be powered with 9VDC so you can use one power adapter to power it which is nice.
As an aside, I dunno what you use for output, but I made an op-amp output board to bypass the noisy on-board output (which goes right past the PPU and picks up a ton of noise) that really improved the cleanliness of the audio. More info as well as the schematic and board layout can be found here. The second iteration, though SMD, can be powered with 9VDC so you can use one power adapter to power it which is nice.
I use low-gains NESmod currently, but after listening to the NESA mod my interest is definitely piqued. Is it only RCA out? or will NESA work with 1/4 outs?
i was worried when i bought my midines that the guy would just take my money but it did come.
it worked well enough but i wouldn't gig with it.
this was maybe four years ago.
Last edited by electricloverecords (Feb 20, 2012 5:05 pm)
m00dawg wrote:As an aside, I dunno what you use for output, but I made an op-amp output board to bypass the noisy on-board output (which goes right past the PPU and picks up a ton of noise) that really improved the cleanliness of the audio. More info as well as the schematic and board layout can be found here. The second iteration, though SMD, can be powered with 9VDC so you can use one power adapter to power it which is nice.
I use low-gains NESmod currently, but after listening to the NESA mod my interest is definitely piqued. Is it only RCA out? or will NESA work with 1/4 outs?
I use RCAs but you can use 1/4" if you wanted. For stereo, you would probably want to share 1 ground pin for the jack; for mono it would hook up to the NESA board the same way as the RCAs. The board has one GND/output pair for each channel so there is plenty of flexibility.
1.0 can be etched at home. 2.3 is all SMD and double-sided so I opted to have it fabbed (from DorkBot) but it was fairly inexpensive. I want to do a third revision that will use the 4th op-amp channel for a passive mixer (should you want mono out for any reason, just like the original output of the NES) but it's not a huge priority at the moment.
I should have some spares of the 2.3 board if you want me to send you one. You would have to populate it but it's not terribly bad. The resistors can be a bit tricky as they kept sticking to iron, but otherwise it's not terrible to build.
Last edited by m00dawg (Feb 20, 2012 5:59 pm)
i was worried when i bought my midines that the guy would just take my money but it did come.
it worked well enough but i wouldn't gig with it.
this was maybe four years ago.
4 years ago was about the time I started hearing rumblings about lengthy orders and things. Why would you not gig with it? Does it just crap out some of the time or is it more like random quirks? Sounds like it's not the way to go for us since we want to use it mostly for a live setting, doh!
well, it's kind of tough to tell if it's the cart or the nintendo but it would just crash or freeze randomly. there was something it didn't like with midi that would crash it but i can't remember what it was. it was less reliable than an nes game.
still, it did work sometimes and enough to have some great jam sessions with it. if you wrote a song you'd be able to record it.
one time my friend and i ran it from a monomachine. you can set the midines to change the screen colors. it was really fun.
Indeed the cool screen effects would be a pretty cool thing to have for a live show! But if it's not reliable... I dunno I guess since the turn-around time for Midines is so long, and Chip Maestro seems to be in more active development, it might be best to hold out for it. I sent an e-mail to Wayfar to see if I get a response as well so I can gauge things that way.
For now noisewaves solution seems like it's what we're going to have to contend with today.
Talk to Mr. Spastic and Crashfaster - they both use MIDInes live on a regular basis and may have much to offer you.
I have a known to work MIDInes I may consider selling if you'd like to PM me about it.
the midines is cool but i think an arduinoboy controlling mgb (or lsdj) + some sort of drum machine is much cooler.
i bought my midines from wayfar over ebay and it shipped the day after payment, just saying.
the midines is cool but i think an arduinoboy controlling mgb (or lsdj) + some sort of drum machine is much cooler.
i bought my midines from wayfar over ebay and it shipped the day after payment, just saying.
When did you order it? Recently?