It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high. Professional PCBs were way out of reach of a home constructor, and many of the integrated circuits that might have been used were expensive and difficult to source in small quantities.

Here in the 21st century we have both cheap PCBs and easy access to a wealth of semiconductors, so enthusiasts for older hardware can set to work on projects that would have been impossible back in the day. Such an offering is [Serdef]’s Tiny Parallel Port General MIDI Synthesizer for DOS PCs, a very professionally produced synth that you might have paid a lot of money to own three decades ago.

At its heart is a SAM2695 synthesiser chip, and the board uses the parallel port as an 8-bit I/O port. The software side is handled by a TSR (a Terminate and Stay Resident driver loaded at startup, for those of you who are not DOS aficionados), and there are demonstrations of it running with a few classic games.

If the chip used here interests you, you might like to look at a similar project for an Arduino. The Kickstarter we covered is now long over, but you can also find it on GitHub.