Vintage Synth Repair

Alan, This is a Mac serial port and all are the same. Alesis, Korg, Roland, Yamaha, etc. Some will run at 115800 baud....   Fran

--- In vintagesynthrepair@yahoogroups.com, "Alan" <alan_probandt@...> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>   I just won a Kawai Gmega tone module on ebay and noticed that it has a serial port-to-MIDI connector like many mid-1990s tone modules do.  This is a miniDIN8 connector. 
>   This is an interesting feature as it allows the PC to send/receive data from the synth and converts that data into MIDI signals.  It converts the 38400 baud RS232 serial into 31250 baud serial and back again.  With this port, I can use Visual BASIC 6 serial I/O COM port routines to send/get sysex without using the cryptic and incomprehensible Windows API functions to access the MIDI port.
>    The Yamaha manuals for the synths of that era have this connector documented and I have been able to get it working by making a custom cable and installing the to-host driver from Yamaha.  
>    Does anyone know if these ports are 'standard' between the other synth manufacturers?  Will a custom cable made for a Yamaha work on the miniDIN8 serial port of the Kawai?  
>    I sent an detailed e-mail to Kawai tech support and got back an order form to buy the service manual at a cost that is greater than I paid for the tone module itself on eBay.  And I would have no way of knowing if the information that I'm looking for would actually be in the service manual.  So much for tech support, but then, it is a rather old piece of equipment.  But if Yamaha can make the service manuals and schematics available in PDF, why can't Kawai?  Actually, the PDF of the schematics was probably done by someone who scanned the schematics from service manual that they had to buy to get the information.  But why can't they just give me a simple answer to a simple tech question?
>    Anyway, these serial ports were popular from the mid-1990s until the USB era and they are found on Yamaha, Roland, Korg, and Kawai tone modules.  Are they all compatible?  Does anyone have any experience with them?  I may end up poking and probing around with it (find the ground pin, find data out by doing a sysex dump from the front panel, etc...), but maybe someone here has already done all that.
>