Quoted from slochar:The old williams games aren't midi, that's for sure. Shouldn't be too hard to make an arduino play it, it's triggered very basically with some driver transistors (sys 4-6) and a PIA output (system 7).
For the games that don't have background sounds, even easier, you don't have to worry about providing a way to ramp up the speed/pitch of the background.... just wait for your trigger and play the wav file.
I don't think any games are actually driven with MIDI, but many of the sound boards from back then have their instructions mapped to middleware which can output the resultant instructions in MIDI. I'm just not familiar enough with the DE sound boards to know if it's something off the shelf or proprietary - I still need to read through those links. This type of effort (if it even exists or could exist) would alleviate some of the concerns Chris Granner has with the PinSound board, and get the benefit of that board - i.e. still get higher quality sounds played live using samples or VSTs.
I mean this is potentially a huge effort, but I am willing to bet a lot of the legwork is done, it's now a matter of stitching things together. I have no clue how these old boards work, but I know MIDI and general sound design very well, so mapping it to that made the most sense.
