Do you have a driver for .... (fill in the blanks)?

No, probably not. The only other device I have a driver for is the Midi Translator PC. Find more information here. I developed this driver purely for my own satisfaction and for the moment I have had enough of driver development fun.

Can I get support for the 8 Port SE or other Opcode product through you?

No. I have no connection whatsoever with Opcode. If you have a malfunctioning 8 Port don't come to me. I have no expertise in those matters, sorry.

Do you know where I can buy an 8 Port SE?

I'm afraid not. They probably don't make them anymore. Maybe you can find them secondhand somewhere if you look around.

The driver seems to stop working after ten minutes or so. I have to reboot to get it working again.

You are using the demo version of the driver. You can get a full working version here or go to www.shareit.com and order productid 191602.


You can reactivate the driver without rebooting if you restart it. Consult the help files for instructions on how to restart the driver.

I'm using your driver with Cubase SX and it shows up as 'emulated'. What's the deal?
Cubase SX uses DirectMusic to access MIDI devices. DirectMusic is part of the DirectX libraries that were developed by Microsoft to enable applications to access hardware in a more direct way. As of this moment the 8 Port SE WDM driver is not a DirectMusic driver. That's why it shows up as emulated. Don't worry about this. I get excellent MIDI response using the driver in emulated mode.
The new DirectMusic driver does not have this problem. You might want to consider upgrading to that driver. For more information on DirectMusic and the DirectMusic driver go here.

Just for the record, Cubase SX is the only application that I know of that makes use of DirectMusic to access MIDI devices at this moment. But there may be more in the future.

No matter what I do I can't get the 8 Port SE working with your driver. What is wrong?

First make sure that you followed the installation instructions carefully. You could try to uninstall the driver and go through the setup process again.

Next check that you have a working parallel port on your system. The parallel port may be disabled in the BIOS setup. Check the manual of your motherboard if you're not sure about this. You can check if there is a parallel port on your system by going to the device manager. The section Ports (COM&LPT) should list at least one printer port. Also the port should be configured as standard (uni-directional) port. Usually this is configured through the BIOS setup as well. Again check the manual that came with your motherboard.

A good test to check whether your system is setup allright is to see if the 8 Port SE works on Windows 98 with the original Opcode driver. If it works with that it should work with my driver as well.

There is a possibility that your printer port is incompatible with the 8 Port SE. I experienced this with one system on which I tested the driver. Again a definite test is to try it on Windows 98. That's how I found out that the parallel port on that motherboard simply refused to work with the 8 Port SE.

If you find that the parallel port is faulty you can buy a parallel port extension card for little money.
If the parallel port is OK and you've carefully followed the installation instructions and still no luck then you can send me an email asking for support. Please describe the problems you're experiencing as precisely as you can. If you get error messages please copy them to your support request. Also add your system setup, describing motherboard, processor, operating system and anything else that may be helpful. The more information you give me the easier it will be for me to investigate the problem.

Can I use the 8 Port SE patchbay utility with your driver?
The original Opcode driver came with a handy little application that allowed you to change routing programs and other things on the 8 Port SE. It was called '8PortSE.exe'.
The good news is: yes, you can use this tool with the new driver as well. The bad news is: the tool crashes each time you close it. This in itself is not a real problem. The settings you make remain intact and nothing is damaged or corrupted. The only thing is that it is rather annoying to have to click away two warning messages every time you exit the application.

As this was bugging me too I decided to delve a little bit deeper into this problem. To my surprise I found out that this problem was not related to my driver at all. It is in fact a bug in the application. The reason it was never discovered is that the section of the code that contains the bug will never be called if you run the application on Windows 98 or Windows 95. It will only rear it's ugly head once you run it on a NT-based operating system such as Windows 2000.
After I established this I even found a cure. A simple correction fixes the problem. The only thing is I don't want to redistribute this patched version of the application. I don't think I can legally do that and I don't even want to get into that. So what I'll do is I will tell you how to fix the application. That leaves you with the choice to either fix the problem or live with it (it's not that bad after all).

Ok. What you need is a tool called a hex-editor. If you don't know what that is then maybe you shouldn't even try to do this or maybe find someone who is knowledgable with computers and can help you. You open the file 'MQSYSTEM.DLL' in the hex-editor. This file should be among the files in the directory to which you have installed the 8 Port SE software. At the address 0x10aa (hexadecimal number) you'll find a byte with value 0xfa. Change this to 0xfc. Save the file with this new value.
That's all. The application won't crash anymore.

If all this sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you then just go with the second option. Leave it as it is. Beside the nuisance there is no real harm. If you really can't live with it then find someone to help you to fix this problem. Please don't send me mail about this. This information is all you need to know and I'm not willing to give more information or send you patched files.

Everytime I use the 8 Port SE patchbay utility it crashes on exit?

See the response to the previous question.

When I unzip the zip file that was sent to me I get the error: 'Unexpected end of file!'

The zip files that are created by my mailing engine seem to be incompatible with some applications that claim to handle zip files. Apparently a problem exists with the files in sub-folders. The zip utiltity that is part of Windows XP is one of the applications that are unable to handle these files.
The solution is to use a different application to unzip the files. All versions of WinZip can extract the files without any problems. A trial version of WinZip 8.1 can be downloaded from www.winzip.com.


It is unknown to me whether the error lies in my zip packages or that the extracting utilities are at fault. Future distributions of the driver will no longer suffer from this problem.

When I use the demo driver my system sometimes freezes completely.

This is a bug in the old version of the demo driver. There is a new version (1.0.0.446) you can download that will fix this issue.
The problem occurs when you are running the driver on Windows XP. If you open an input while the driver is active, the system will freeze if the input receives MIDI data after the time-limit has elapsed. You have to reset the computer to bring it back to life.
The problem occurs only with the demo driver (versions lower than 1.0.0.446) and only if you run it on Windows XP.

I use the driver on Windows 2000 and everything seems to work fine. However, when I try to use the patchbay utility I get the message "The Music Quest ME8PSE driver was not found. MIDI functions will be disabled for this session." I can't use the program.

Windows 2000 limits the number of MIDI ports to 10 outputs and 10 inputs. By default one of the outputs is the Microsoft WaveTable SW Synth. If your soundcard also has a MIDI output, that leaves only 8 outputs for the 8 Port SE.
The problem is that the patchbay utility communicates with the 8 Port SE through the control port, which is a special output port for this purpose. But the control port is the ninth output and will not show up in this scenario.
One possible solution is to temporarily disable your soundcard. This will free one MIDI output and the 8 Port SE's control port will be usuable again.
Another solution is to upgrade to Windows XP, which does not have this limitation.

Will there be a 64 bit version of the driver?

In the past I have been (over)optimistic about this. My view of the current situation is that the need for a 64 bit driver is not that great. Most people are still on 32 bit and I don't see that changing rapidly the coming years. So in view of a lack of resources both financially as well as time-wise, I decided to postpone my plans. That is no to say there will never be a 64 bit version. It is just going to take a little longer.

I am experiencing problems that could be related to Nsynas32 service?

If you are running software protected by a Syncrosoft protection key you might run into this problem. Such a device, commonly referred to as 'dongle', comes with Cubase for instance. Nowadays they come in the form of a USB stick, in the older days they used to be connected to the parallel port. I myself had some trouble with apparently an old version of the protection device driver. It seemed it still did some things to the parallel port, even though I have a USB dongle. It was quickly solved by disabling the Nsynas32 service. It is probably always best to install the latest drivers of these devices.