BulkyMIDI-32 is based on the mt32-pi project, bringing you the all the auditory excellence that was the Roland MT32. It's emulation, but it's an obtainable package that won't cost more than my current car. Widely considered to be the ultimate in retro MIDI-modules, it's the audio card every 90s PC gamer eventually found out was never actually an audio card and instead its own thing completely separate from your computer.

The BulkyMIDI-32 was my attempt at building something that would look nice on my desk while playing all of those classic Sierra games. After putting it together I took stock of all the features I had originally wanted on it, but I realized that I would need an additional board just to physically fit all of the connectors and larger components needed to build the system of my dreams (within manageable reason). And so - work on extras board was started with the aim of implementing the following features:

• RS-232 circuitry for communicating with a PC, this allows the installed Arduino Pro Micro to perform baud rate translation when communicating with MIDI-equipment through a PCs serial port. This is needed because MIDI uses a custom baud rate, generally well outside the tolerances of what a regular serial card can communicate at.
• Passive two-channel audio mixer, allowing you to mix the sound effects coming from the sound card with that of the MIDI-module. Also, physical potentiometers are always more impressive than setting up audio mixers in software (according to me, no blinded study attempted or even considered).
• Status LEDs
• Three extra MIDI ports that can individually be configured to serve as additional OUT or THRU ports.

This is the extras module, check out the related shared projects for any additional modules - these include extra functionality in addition to the faceplates shown in the images. While the baud rate translation feature as well as the passive audio mixer can be used as a standalone module by itself, the extras-board was designed to fit under the main BulkyMIDI-32-module.

NB! This is revision G of the board. While the earlier revisions of the board worked the way it was designed, I encountered a problem obtaining functional RS-232 modules - the cloned chip on the later ones I bought either locked up randomly or straight up burned to a crisp during use. For this reason I dropped the modules, opting for an Arduino Pro Micro to do the processing as well as using a socketed MAX232A chip for the level conversion.