2:14 a.m. - 2005-03-18
travis-esque
Thinking about my soon-to-arrive super keyboard has led me to a multi-hour websurfing binge in which I have taken in a lot of hardware reviews but not much information. Anyway, this has somehow led me to the MIDI-NES: http://www.wayfar.net/ . (warning, the site is very badly designed and the content itself is written, badly, for technical insiders) The basic idea is that they have made a Nintendo cartridge that you can use to access the Nintendo's sound features. This isn't so amazing in itself (Travis had that thing for the Gameboy, and now seems to somewhat disdain its use as cliched), but what is more exciting is that the cartridge has a MIDI cable running out of it, so that you can control the NES's sound system from any random MIDI controller. Like for example my keytar. Now, I don't know the first thing about MIDI, but I think the obvious thing to do with this is to form a band of four people using keytars, each one accessing and controlling a separate Nintendo, so that they can control the triangle wave, noise channel, and two square wave channels.
Actually, since they are on different midi channels, is there some gizmo that would let you plug several MIDI cables into one end and this thing into the other? I like the idea of four people standing around a single Nintendo which generates tones in response to what they do on their keytars. Assuming this makes any sense at all, someone needs to give me either $100 (for one MIDI NES device) or $400 (for four of them...I will make do without a matching set of keytars for now) and book me a show.
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