Roland MT-200 Pt1: Power Repair 

Re: #2, I'm interested in your edit/rendering process and settings, have you thought about doing a video about your recording and production setup? (Or, have you done one and I've just missed it)

I am getting really close to doing a video on that. I switched from using Blender to Davinci Resolve as my editor a while ago and about a month ago switched to a BMPCC4K camera which is a huge departure from my Nikon D5300. My Editing PC is in it's final config now with 2xE5-2690s, 64GB RAM, and a 1080ti but the high bitrate 4k footage takes a lot of power to work with. For this video I also used Resolve's noise reduction for the first time which is very intense in the render making it take about 4x as long. But the result is much better. There are a lot of reasons it takes a long time to render, I'll go into the more technical details in the eventual video. The gist is, I'm using a very high quality workflow so it isn't easy. Also, I'm doing everything on Linux. So I'm sort of forging my own path.

Around 8:16 the camera seems to glitch out for a couple of seconds.

As an s330 owner, yes Roland did use specific floppy drives and you either need the specific chinon model as is fitted and ask roland for the jumper settings or buy a modded drive which is what I did (although it now has a faulty floppy cable which is soldered in, and the OS is on fdd so no drive=no one home), i think the other thing it needs is a drive ready signal (pin 30?) but naturally PC drives are generally designed as cheap possible so omit unneeded extra features. There is also a Toshiba drive that would work (as fitted to the s330) but I'm unsure of the model.

Have you tried digging around for another FZ-357 and swap out the controller? That head really smells like it's dead and buried.

Are you talking about the spoiler video? Because that was the duke nukem theme. The only doom music I heard was on the yamaha in the beginning. Essentially what I’m saying is what this played was NEDM.

@@smallmoneysalvia no. I was talking about the doom song he played in the beginning from floppy disk. Obviously he played the duke3d song near the end. It says Duke Nukem 3d right on the setup screen.

@@MontieMongoose But he didn't test Doom music on this device. It was on the Yamaha that he demoed it.

I remember something about some drives having pads on them for drive select. I'll have to look at the ones I've got and see if I can make that work on any of them. If not, somewhere I have a length of 34 conductor cable and some connectors. I can try making an adapter cable to give doing in the unmodified way a shot.

I've done some more testing. The FZ-357 drive in it isn't just set to DS0. There is some other way it is configured that makes it unusual. I tried several different brand drives jumped to DS0 and none of them worked. I tried doing an Amiga mod on a Sony MPF920 Z/121 and that didn't work either. Although the Amiga modded drive is closer than the others. It is able to detect the disk with the mod, but it never gets to either reading it or saying it's improper.

@@TechTangents Both in my Amiga 600 and SD35 I have FZ354s (the only difference between 354s and 357s is that the latter ones support HD floppies, but _only_ if the JP2 jumper on the board is shorted, apart from that they should be identical). Jumpers in both ones are set to DS0, MM, RDY, but in the Roland one the TTL/C-MOS jumper is not present. Maybe that's the difference? I think that the most PC drives use TTL levels, so if your module requires CMOS levels, that might be the problem.

We really take for-granted now that Everything Just Works. Imagine having to Abort Retry Fail SD cards constantly lol

I have no idea about audio equipment, but I do know that center negative was definitely a thing back in older electronics. And there might have just been 'standard' parts that were designed around a center negative...

You mean Quick-Disk? That became a pretty popular format in the music world, Roland embraced it wholeheartedly with a lot of their products (like the D-20 workstation) before 3.5in took over.

*sip* Yep, Quake 3 was a good game.

I'll just leave a comment so I will be reminded if this is true. Awesome!

That sounds more correct. It just didn't come to me off the top of my head and I didn't think to double check it in editing.

Was gonna say this too lol.

That's a good thing to point out, I did forget about that distinction. I'll bring that up in the next video and demo it next to an actual synthesizer.

It's perfectly cromulent to call these synthesizers. They are romplers, but were often called tone modules or sound modules. The word "sampler" is pretty strongly married to a device (or a plugin) which is primarily designed for the user to easily sample audio sources and play them back musically. A rompler plays back samples, but it is not a sampler. (These distinctions are blurred when considering the pricier workstation synths which consolidated sampler, rompler, sequencer, and multiple types of synthesizer functions.) "Generating audio waveforms" is the same as "play(ing) back audio file samples." (cf. wavetable synthesis). "Changing pitch" is a "kind of modulation." Changing amplitude is a kind of modulation, also, which is essential for amplitude envelopes. There are lots of types of musical audio synthesis, so it can be confusing. Part of that is due to patents, where manufacturers tweak their designs to not infringe but achieve similar functionality. (cf. Yamaha's FM synthesis). Anyway, these are terms of art, so meaning can vary by time, place, dialect, and register. My first sampler was the Roland S-550.

naturesinterface You do have a good point, but it really isn’t fair to call romplers (which are just samplers, except the sounds are stored in non changeable ROM) and aren’t really generating sounds, simply repeating them, say for example like a CD player “reproduces” sound, not synthesizing anything, of that makes sense

Most floppy drives can be modded to appear as drive 0 anyway, either on the PCB, or with a simple twist in the cable. ;) The Gotek doesn't have any app-specific chips in it for handling that, just a few simple buffers. Everything else on the Gotek is handled by an STM32 (ARM based) MCU. A floppy drive just has signals on like DS0 / DS1, and MOTA / MOTB. The floppy interface just drives those signals Low to select the drive and enable the spindle motor. (most signals on a floppy drive are normally pulled High by resistors, hence they are known as Active-Low.) The twist in the cable on PCs basically just swaps those signals.

so he should be able to use a normal drive if he gets a cable with a twist in it

@@DouglasWalrath I think so, yep. Some drives in synths and keyboards are custom, but this looks like a fairly standard drive. It's worth checking the PCB itself on some "PC" style drives, as some have solder pads or wire links to force them to DS0. But yeah, I reckon a twist cable would work fine in this. The original drive might be just slightly out of alignment, or the heads are a bit worn. Alignment is fairly easy to do with a known good disk (with some data on), and an oscilloscope. It usually involves rotating the stepper motor very slightly (by loosening some screws), then making sure the heads are dead-on the track. Probably not worth the effort though. Just use a new PC drive with a twist cable, or find one that does have a DS0 jumper. Could probably use a drive from an Atari ST or another synth. Not an Amiga drive, though, as they are slightly different.

No. Just no.

I'm shooting with a BMPCC4K using an MF3 to Nikon G Series adapter. For my macro shots I almost always use a Zoom-NIKKOR 35~70mm 1:3.5~4.8 with a reversing ring. I full manual everything when I shoot. So I take my time to setup each shot so it looks exactly how I want.

I know this is nearly a necro reply, but these devices are only capable of 24 or 28 voice polyphony depending on the firmware and year it was made. A black midi file would likely lock up the unit or cause it to generate an error of some sort. It is also limited on the temp in that they won't go above 250bpm. Midi files with faster tempo will play at the max 250 speed on these.

@@IvoryTowerCollections no, thanks for the update, I'm glad to have an update to this!

The MT-32 is a totally different kind of synth so the comparison doesn't really fit... the MT-32 is more of a typical synth, and the MT-200 is more akin to a Sound Canvas - based on a locked down sampling architecture and adheres to GM/GS standards. I don't know why they chose the MT naming scheme for this device, but I don't think Roland has ever been particularly good at following their own names. They used this same set of sounds in the Roland XP-10, which is NOT based on the JV-1080 like the other XP keyboards are.

oh yep i watched this... thanks youtube for making me watch this again