Well, against what I thought were all odds, I managed to get the Amiga Forever emulator to run OctaMED with working MIDI. Effectively, a virtual MIDI interface can be virtually inserted into the emulated serial port, which then runs through the normal PC MIDI system, in my case a new USB MIDI adaptor. This managed to get some of the music playing, but only some. About half of the MED files would not load into OctaMED SoundStudio v1.03c, which was the last and best Amiga version. I wondered if an older version of MED would help, but it didn't.
I started the day by sorting the MED files that worked from those that didn't. A couple were compressed (a glance at the hex file via Irfanview showed this) but OctaMED didn't seem to recognise these at all. Then I realised that I must have been using the PC version of OctaMED, because Arcangel, Martian Rover Patrol, and Roton were all PC games, so I don't think I even had my Amiga back then. A quick search took me, via Facebook, to a free copy of OctaMED for PC, which was only recently (2017) given away by the original publisher, Ray Burt-Frost.
This program, MED Soundstudio v2.1, seems to load all of the files. I've not tested it with MIDI yet, but I'm confident it will work so I've ordered a USB floppy drive to transfer the data to the SY-85. Then I can re-record all 40 or so tunes from the 1990s. Of course, the Arcangel music, Roton and Overlander (the Martian Rover Patrol theme) are already recorded in pretty good quality anyway, and the original Synaesthesia music, but that's all. A lot is missing.
I'll create a new album of this music, but won't release it all publicly. There is little point in re-releasing Arcangel (I could theoretically release a 'remaster' but it would be nigh on identical to the original, which was fine). The Synaesthesia 1999 music too doesn't need an outing, and I can't release the Mission Impossible Theme remix, but a few tunes, like Overlander, Metropolis, Opiad etc. are worthy of being 'out there'.
I wondered whether to record them dry, without any audio effects; the SY-85 imposes its effects across the whole sequence rather than per-track. You can adjust the send levels per track, so turn down the reverb, say, on some, but not have different effects per-track. I think this is overkill. To have one copy of the music as intended is enough. This is infinitely better than losing it forever; preservation is my main goal.
The OctaMED quest made me think about the ephemeral nature of the internet. Work from just 20 years ago is so hard to locate. If Ray Burt-Frost hadn't made OctaMED free, and if I hadn't managed to repair the SY-85's ancient drive, lots of my music would have been lost forever. 20 years is a blip in the life of humanity, yet it was already difficult to get things working. So much from that time is in danger of being lost. I found a post on a contemporary Amiga forum asking for Hilt and Hilt II, my old games, so I decided to put these on itch.io, a good and stable platform for downloading. If OctaMED was on itch, I could have found it in a flash. Will itch be around in 20 years?
In other work, I spent a lot of time filing the Wonderland event. Mike Drew took a video which indicated how dark we were, I'll investigate lighting options. For every show, like every painting, or anything else, the next one will be better. I also found time to glue some wood for the future hand/bird and Aspartame frames, too.
