Used to play this in the 80s. LAN parties before the LAN. Good times! :)
Although the most amusing part is that if you wanted more than 4 colors (which was basically any game) you had to use "Low" resolution mode which was only 320 by 200. MIDIMAZE took it a step further and only used about 1/4 of the screen leaving you with only about 160 by 100 of gameplay area. I guess networked multiplayer first person shooters over daisy chained serial lines were pretty heavy duty for machines designed in 1985. :)
Other fun ST facts:
They were huge in early electronic music because they were cheap and had those handy built in MIDI ports. I believe cubase was originally written for the ST.
They have 4 characters buried in their character set that you can assemble into a square and get a picture of "Bob" from Church of the Subgenius fame.
When they had a machine exception, they'd paint little bombs on the left side of the screen, where the number of them indicated the exception type (bus error, 0 divide, etc)
>They were huge in early electronic music because they were cheap and had those handy built in MIDI ports. I believe cubase was originally written for the ST.
Indeed - the reason I got into electronic music was because I had an ST (and that was part of the reason I got an ST, if you get my meaning). Tried Pro 24, and then got hold of Cubase. Used to spend hours improvising music using it, using muting via the F-keys. Rock solid setup, just worked and was dead easy and quick to use. Amazingly it translates to the version in use today - I used to show it to my pupils (via an ST emulator) to show them how what they were using had a history going back 20+ years.
I wonder how different the musical landscape would have been without MIDI ports being built into the ST. Yes, of course, you can buy an interface, but if it's already there...
Some friends and I used to have gatherings to set up MIDI-rings and play MIDI-Maze for hours. I'm having difficulty remembering, but I think we sometimes had as many as eight players. The more players, the more likely the dreaded "MIDI-ring boo-boo" would interrupt a game. I wrote a map designer in GFA Basic, and I recall we had a bunch of custom maps as a result.
Definitely a spiritual precursor to DOOM on a LAN.
The first "network programming" I ever did was a GFA Basic program that talked over MIDI between two STs. Long before I ever saw a real networking protocol or a "null modem cable.". :)
Lastly (just for geek wow really) a guy called Douglas Little has written a POC of Doom for the STE (as well as Quake II for the Falcon):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCvx2O5M69E
> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software, under the title Faceball 2000. [snip] It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It was thought it did so by connecting multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - thus seven such adapters would have been needed for a 16 player experience.
And three months ago I had a nice discussion with one of the people responsible for the Game Gear version:
According to an interview with one of the developers it is not possible to play it with the standard 4-player adaptor in 16 player mode. the developers came up with a daisy chain method but did not release the hardware nor the specs.
Daisy chaining the four player adaptors would not have worked.
Why? The framerate was low, movement wasn't super fast, turning limited by the controls, and you were all playing on the same plane. Doesn't take that much to send x+y+direction.
Wow, MIDI continues to show up in so many places! I recently gave a talk about how to reincarnate the <bgsound> HTML tag with MIDI support and included a huge list of surprising ways that MIDI is used, but I'll have to add MIDI Maze to the list! https://youtu.be/BmfDMylKo5I?t=624
The thing is, background MIDI on web pages was sort of an accidental quirk in the history of the protocol. Its primary function has always been its face value; it's literally in the name: Musical Instrument Digital Interface. And that's where MIDI has dominated since its introduction in the 80's.
Which, in some ways, is not for the best, because a better name for the protocol would have been Keyboard-Driven Instrument Interface. MIDI messages (to the extent that they are standardized) aren't good for anything else.
ROLI Seaboard is an example of pushing the protocol to its limits. The original spec didn't have polyphonic pitch bend (so a continuous slide from a minor chord into a major one is not possible); ROLI gets around it by transmitting each note one a different MIDI channel as if it were a separate instrument.
This example is just one limitation, but there are plenty; there's no good (read: standard) way to control a stringed instrument (or its emulation) with MIDI. You can play one note on a guitar in 4 ways (on 4 different strings), but MIDI isn't specced for that. Horns are passable because they are monophonic, but controlling performance aspects is up to the software. Drums get away by assigning different MIDI notes to different ways of playing a drum. Etc.
The thing is, the protocol was made just barely flexible enough that it lasted to these days; and the ability to drive an 80's synth with a controller built today (and connect them all to a modern computer/iPad/etc) is an amazing feature.
Because of that, MIDI underpins all modern digital instruments and music software. And because of that, anyone who makes electronic music is a keyboardist (or at least has a MIDI keyboard). The word MIDI controller pretty much defaults to MIDI keyboard.
Want to really have your mind blown about where MIDI shows up? The shape of the protocol defines the shape of the music. Just like different programming languages encourage different styles, so do musical instruments and their physical interfaces.
And so the absolute majority of electronic music today is written from a keyboardist perspective.
You won't get to hear a minor chord continuously slide into a major one in pretty much any music you hear that was made with digital/software instruments/computers.
Because the piano can't to that.
And because of that, the keyboards can't.
And so the synthesizers don't.
And so MIDI doesn't.
And so nearly all music software, for decades, wouldn't. (Some does, but it's not standard, so no mass adoption.)
And so your music doesn't have it a major chord slide into a minor. Because even if you don't play keyboards, your interface to digital instruments is still a piano roll.
> You won't get to hear a minor chord continuously slide into a major one in pretty much any music you hear that was made with digital/software instruments/computers.
I'm not sure I understand this. I can go into FL Studio right now, add the two chords to the piano roll and set the notes to slide and it works.
Are you implying that composers/producers don't do the slide because of how annoying it is to input via MIDI controller?
>I can go into FL Studio right now, add the two chords to the piano roll and set the notes to slide and it works.
FL Slide Notes is a proprietary feature (a creative use of MIDI) that only works with FL Studio Plug-ins[1][2]. The new shiny plugin you got for that fat sound? No note slide for you.
So, this is not a feature you can count on in any DAW, but specific to particular set of plug-ins. (In particular, Live had nothing like that last time I checked, nor did the DAW's I use).
ROLI has a more advanced version of this, but again, the support is limited because it is not standard MIDI.
Portamento is a fairly standard feature on many synthesizers - there's no need to use MIDI to spell out the full range of sliding one note into another, or to use a pitch bend. On supporting instruments (such as a great number of vintage and modern analog synthesizers, and perhaps a majority of software synthesizers/samplers) MIDI can send a control to enable portamento (and to set a desired speed) right before moving from one set of notes to another. After the slide is done, portamento can be disabled with another MIDI control signal. This can be used precisely for the effect of sliding a minor chord into a major chord, for example. Admittedly, this does require that the instrument be designed with portamento support in mind, which does seem like it could be an arbitrary limitation on instruments that may otherwise be capable of only simple pitch bends (though since these typically affect all notes at once I'm still not sure how trivial the portamento idea would be to implement in general).
But having the concept of per-note pitchbend built into MIDI itself would be a much easier way of achieving this.
Their point wasn't "sliding notes in a chord is 100% impossible, prove me wrong!", their point was that the only reason it's not trivial in the first place is because MIDI is biased towards piano keyboards, and that has had a huge influence on a lot of the music released in the past few decades.
I appreciate your response, though my point wasn't to "prove [the above poster] wrong", but that the ability to slide notes in chords is not exclusively dependent on a specific FL Studio plugin and has always traditionally been the domain of synthesizer builders rather than the MIDI standard. Perhaps the effect is more uncommon in music through the past few decades as a result of this, but it's not absent and dedicated musicians with enough resources were still able to make it work.
I do agree that it is a potentially limiting influence on the music most readily produced, but for that matter (IMO) so is the traditional adherence to 12-tone equal temperament that is often implicit in how the standard is implemented. It would be nice to have finer control here without having to resort to various hacks, but finer resolution means more bits required to represent a given frequency. Finding a different better way to encode MIDI data that could be used as a standard going into the future is something that I believe requires great consideration and might do well with a significantly different approach (but I don't presume to have given it enough thought to say one way or the other).
There's no standard on how that would work with polyphony (that would be pretty much equivalent to polyphonic pitch bend). With your trick, you'd still need to specify which note goes to which new note with portamento/glide, and there is no standard for that.
The problem is usually worse with analog gear, where oscillators are commonly assigned to keys via a round-robin scheme. So enabling polyphonic portamento means that even if you play the same chord over and over, you'd hear the notes slide! Not quite what you intend.
So while some polyphonic synths have portamento/glide in poly mode, lack of support in the protocol means that it acts unpredictably: you only have control of where the notes are sliding to, as a set.
You can see the problem very clearly, using Behringer Deepmind 6 (6-voice analog with poly portamento) as an example here[1].
At this point, you break out your polyphony into voices, put each voice on its own track / MIDI channel, and pitch bend / portamento that (and record separately, if needed). And then you have the ROLI solution. Which is not compatible with any other MIDI controller.
As I said, MIDI is hackable enough to allow one to do pretty much everything, but it's going to be non-standard. And standards and defaults matter.
For that matter, that's why we have MPE[2], which is an extension of MIDI, but it's very, very new (2018-new).
Well for polyphony the "which note goes where" issue could, with creative sequencing, be solved by using different channels for each individual note to override the synthesizer's configured behavior [also enabling the use of simple pitch bends for the effect] - but I guess any good solution here will end up requiring even more hardware or software to allow this [it looks like this is essentially the goal of MPE] and, as you imply, arguably be a "nonstandard hack". But music IMHO is often about finding value and personal expression in the nonstandard along with the standard (perhaps I'm a little biased from too much jazz, because admittedly this isn't the case for all players in all styles). And musicians have certainly employed MIDI to use these techniques for decades.
Regardless of my possibly misguided attempts at defending a 36-year-old spec, I absolutely still agree with you, however, that an improved standard could certainly make having more creative control simpler and easier, requiring fewer "hacks".
True, FL's note-slide is proprietary, but you do get some degree of pitch-bend (not sure if you can do it per-note without hacks) because of the mod wheels on keyboards
MIDI CC messages are a bit more flexible, but you're still limited to "[Channel#] [CCCode] [Value]"
minor chords continuously slide into a major one hasn't really been done by orchestra's in the hundreds of years before MIDI either. I don't think this is MIDIs fault.
In Sacramento, for awhile from about 1988-1992 there were monthly meetups where everyone who had an Atari ST would bring them and play MIDI Maze. We occasionally had so many people that we would make two rings because we exceeded the limit of 16 computers.
I owned two Atari STs at the time, so I was always popular at these events.
I was a little young for the original, but Faceball 2000 has a special place in my heart. I asked for the Game Boy 4-player adapter just hoping one day I'd know enough people with the game to play a full match. Most I ever got together was 3, but it was exciting as hell.
> The original MIDI Maze team consisted of James Yee as the business manager, Michael Park as the graphic and networking programmer, and George Miller writing the AI/drone logic.
Used to play an open source clone of this in the universities' computer pool, after doing the SPARC assembler assignments, on the same boxes. Good memories.
Although the most amusing part is that if you wanted more than 4 colors (which was basically any game) you had to use "Low" resolution mode which was only 320 by 200. MIDIMAZE took it a step further and only used about 1/4 of the screen leaving you with only about 160 by 100 of gameplay area. I guess networked multiplayer first person shooters over daisy chained serial lines were pretty heavy duty for machines designed in 1985. :)
Other fun ST facts:
They were huge in early electronic music because they were cheap and had those handy built in MIDI ports. I believe cubase was originally written for the ST.
They have 4 characters buried in their character set that you can assemble into a square and get a picture of "Bob" from Church of the Subgenius fame.
When they had a machine exception, they'd paint little bombs on the left side of the screen, where the number of them indicated the exception type (bus error, 0 divide, etc)