Finding the Right MT32Pi Hat

Since nobody can afford a real Roland MT32 a bunch of smart people had figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi to emulate it as a hardware device, which was much more in my price range. I did some digging and found that most Pi hats were for the MiSTer but i did come across this one from Chris-JH on Github. I got some boards made on JLCPCB and waited for them to arrive.

Building up the PCB, with issues

Building it out was really easy if you just follow the guides on the GitHub pages above. I did have to make a Midi to GamePort cable to hook it up to my old 486 machine for testing. For the first test I was getting no sound of out the thing. This was when I tested it on another Pi and realised I had an issue with a couple of the GPIO pins on my 3B+, swapped it out to a PiZero 2 and it was perfectly fine.

Adding every single Sound Font I could find

The Github page has a few Soundfont libraries that you can use, but me as usual had to have all of them I could find. Rummaging across the internet I managed to scape together a collection of 260 SoundFonts totally 31GB! Totally unnecessary but what I wanted.

How it ended up and next steps

It all turned out pretty good and works as advertised, the only thing I am going to do I design a proper all in one case for this HAT for either a PiZero 2 or a 3B+.