
MIDI Maze - lelf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
======
a-dub
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)

~~~
bhauer
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.

~~~
a-dub
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.". :)

------
msla
Handheld deathmatch!

> 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:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18652227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18652227)

~~~
philistine
No one has video proof that the 16-player indeed exists.

Until I see it played with real hardware, I am without an ounce of shame,
saying it doesn’t work.

The Game Boy has many unsubstantiated information repeated ad nauseum so I’m
limping this fabled sixteen player mode with that.

~~~
mycall
16-player using 31.25 kbit/s, that would be interesting.

~~~
mysterydip
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.

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feross
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](https://youtu.be/BmfDMylKo5I?t=624)

~~~
romwell
>MIDI continues to show up in so many places

It always surprises me when people say that :)

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_.

Because MIDI.

I'm really looking forward to MIDI 2.0.

~~~
url00
> 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?

~~~
romwell
>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.

[1][https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=187047](https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=187047)

[2][https://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.php?t=174776](https://forum.image-
line.com/viewtopic.php?t=174776)

~~~
dwringer
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).

~~~
barryhoodlum
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.

~~~
dwringer
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).

------
siberianbear
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.

------
kgwxd
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.

------
NikkiA
At about that time frame, at university we were playing a similar clone of
Maze Wars that ran over appletalk and allowed up to 30 players:

[https://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/maze-
wars_](https://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/maze-wars_)

------
megaremote
> 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.

So, what did James do?

~~~
Keyframe
_James Yee, owner of Xanth, had a vision..._

------
_0ffh
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.

------
chiph
I remember reading the reviews of this game in ST Informer, and wanted to play
it. But I didn't know any other ST owners in the area. :(

------
georgefrick
When I was younger I used to get to play this at Gencon when it was still in
Milwaukee. All around a good time and the tech is interesting.

------
kazinator
Thanks; this is nice to know about when talking to people about MIDI.

