27 July 2008

DIY MS-DOS Sequencer

This is a very old DIY project I wanted to share with you. This is actually a sequencer I build myself a very long time ago. It is a 286 PC with a 40 Mbyte harddisk and it runs MS-DOS 6.22 with Cakewalk installed. It has a build in keyboard, 9" screen and a midi interface. I just never used it for what I intended it to use. I wanted to use it for midi recording, but just didn't get to it back then. It still runs like a charm and I use it once in a while as a little sequencer to output some midi lines.

It has cost me a lot of time to make all the wholes in the frontpanels etc. In the picture on the right you also see the self build power supply under it. It is kind of a museum piece now in my studio and as long as I can keep in running I won't dispose of it. The diskdrive is not in the best shape, I will have to change that some time. I'm actually surprised it still runs. I don't even know how old it is, but at least 10 years maybe even more.

6 comments:

Javier said...

Funny, I still use Sequencer Plus along my modern DAW...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/valenuni/

Cheers,

JZ:

Synth.nl said...

Cool thanks for the pictures

slabman said...

Hmmm... makes me think -

1. Old sequencer software with low resource requirements
2. Low power miniature motherboard. Flash RAM disk
3. Cheap mono LCD display

= Dedicated hardware sequencer module project

Anonymous said...

yeah! I did almost the same but based on FastTracker instead of Cakewalk... And use it with my two Doepfer monstercases :)

Unknown said...

which version of cakewalk is this? 2.0?

Synth.nl said...

No 4.0. The version number is even in de picture :)