Tools and documentation for hacking on the Ensoniq Mirage.
This project is maintained by Gordon JC Pearce
This is a very simple (perhaps too simple) terminal emulator to communicate with the Mirage running Forth. When run, it will provide an ALSA sequencer input and output, that can be patched to a physical MIDI interface. ALSA is smart enough to “sensibly” merge MIDI messages so in theory you could patch a controller keyboard and MIDIterm to the Mirage.
From Ubuntu you should probably be able to get away with:
$ sudo apt-get install libvte-dev libasound2-devMIDIterm uses waf for building. From the miditerm directory, type:
$ ./waf configure
$ ./wafThere isn’t a lot to it. Start MIDIterm with ./build/miditerm and connect the ports it creates to your MIDI interface. There really needs to be a built-in facility to connect the ports. Patches are welcome. For now, I use qjackctl’s patchbay facility.
Some USB MIDI interfaces have trouble sending “raw” bytes, preferring to see a properly-formatted MIDI message before they will pass it to or from the host PC. MIDIterm sends each keystroke as a MIDI Timecode Quarter-Frame message and interprets these as incoming characters to be displayed, which keeps the interface happy. This slows down transmission by 50% but does mean that it will work reliably with even the pickiest of interfaces.
A useful side-effect of this is that it should be possible to interpret the MIDI stream in the Mirage in such a way that “normal” MIDI messages can be interpreted without disrupting the console traffic. It would also be possible to send “out-of-band” commands to the Forth stack, such as a reset command to make the Mirage reboot.