This graph should help you understand what PARIS can do today in 2018 with (and without) the various drivers:
| Driver | Win3.1 | Win98 | Win2K | WinNT | WinXP | Win7/32 | Win7/64 | Win8/32 | Win8/64 | Win9/32 | Win9/64 | Win10/32 | Win10/64 | Features | Hardware can be used with other DAWs (via ASIO) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original factory drivers | x | Original release of PARIS, aka a "vanilla install" | no | ||||||||||||
| Original ASIO drivers | x | Original release; utter garbage. Yes theoretically, but MEC mains i/o only, high latency and extremely unstable | theoretically yes; practically, no | ||||||||||||
| Chris Thoman's Multicore drivers | x | x | x | x | x | enabled multicore computers and usage under XP for first time | no | ||||||||
| Chris Thoman's ASIO drivers | x | x | x | x | x | original | yes - better drivers, but still issues: MEC i/o only, high latency | ||||||||
| Mike Audet 32-bit drivers | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | stability increases, control panel | no | ||||
| Mike Audet 32/64-bit drivers | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | universal one-click installer which installs Paris 2.2, Paris 3.0 (with PACE copy protection just as the original installer does, but that's copyright law as it is today) and drivers for whichever OS it detects | no |
| Mike Audet ASIO drivers | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | enables stable use with other DAWS; as an added bonus, enables the use of your C16 as an OSC controller for any DAW that supports it (OSC is a kind of "MIDI on steroids") | yes - with full MEC i/o including all expansion cards, and stable down to 32 samples latency (assuming your computer is powerful enough) |
What's the current forum recommendation? If you want to use the PARIS app with the PARIS hardware on up-to-date machines for the price of $50, Mike's 32- or 64-bit drivers (depending on your OS) deliver fifteen-year-newer technology and much more modern approaches to coding than previous efforts, and will yield the most bulletproof and up-to-date PARIS rig yet fielded. This is a no-brainer.
If you want to keep your PARIS hardware, but leave the aging PARIS app behind and run another DAW on it without losing any patching and routing flexibility from your MEC expansion cards:
Mike's $50 ASIO drivers will allow use of all your existing i/o and turn your C16s into MIDI mixers (well, they actually use OSC - same basic idea from most folks' perspective). Grand total $100, and in our opinion the best money you can spend on PARIS so far this century!
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Now - what can you do for free (assuming you're into putting in some elbow grease and smarts)?
Obviously our hands-down recommendation today is a new(er) computer, a modern OS and Mike's carefully created drivers; even a seven- or eight- year old computer with Win7 installed, obtained for $50 or $100 from Craigslist or even free from a friend, will give PARIS vastly greater resources than were ever imagined by its developers, and Mike's drivers have killed some of the old bugs. PARIS will perform like a racehorse, while still giving you modern OS support unimaginable in 1999, making other aspects of musical life (file transfers, the ability to run much more modern applications and accessories etc) so much easier.
But sometimes that's just not how folks want to roll. And even though nothing's going to get you as far as Mike's drivers, there are still resources to nurse an aging computer into service free. So if you're a committed "do it myself for free" DIY'er and you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty:
[Oh - one very important caveat: remember to keep a machine running an old OS OFF the internet, preferably by physically isolating it from your network and saving it as a dedicated "PARIS only" workstation. Operating systems this old are relatively trivial for malicious software or hackers to compromise.]
1) PARIS ran just fine back in the day; there's no reason it won't run just as happily as it did in 1999 if you simply duplicate the hardware and OS in use back then. Machines of this vintage - even "state of the art" for their day - can be found for free or for pennies. Remember that electronics do age; a silicon chip may not age as rapidly, but capacitors on a PSU or motherboard can dry out and work less effectively or fail entirely, as well as the plastic on the motherboard (it's becoming obvious now that some plastic parts on the motherboard, like the frame holding the heat sink in place, or the tabs on a RAM slot, were sometimes not properly formulated for protracted use in a high-heat, high-vibration environment, and can eventually crumble into bits, bringing the computer to a dead halt).
1) PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999 - Running with the PARIS app: A vanilla install of PARIS will work on OS' up to Win NT/2K; assuming you have an old single-core machine (which could probably be found for free or next-to-free) and assuming you still have, or can locate, an old OS install disk, you can install one of these old OS and run PARIS stock, just as happily as you did in 1999. You CANNOT use WinXP or newer with a vanilla install but that may not be a dealbreaker, and it's free and reasonably easy.
2) PARTY LIKE IT'S 2004: With the old PARIS XP DRIVERS you can use a slightly newer multi-core machine (if you get too new you may run into hardware that is too new for the older OS PARIS requires to run on - motherboards will generally remain compatible but make sure you can find drivers for other hardware like video cards). This will require some degree of technical savvy (or at least "fearlessness") as you'll have to follow the detailed instructions needed to "bind" the old non-multi-threading PARIS application processes to a single thread to make it all work. But it did - and will - work. This will get you into the multi-core machine game (for over a decade most machines have been automatically multi-core). The hard limit is that these drivers support a maximum of WinXP; you CANNOT go beyond it.
3) PARIS HARDWARE WITH ASIO: this is more problematic. The early ASIO drivers did work after a fashion. The original version is installed by the PARIS installer and it sucks to the point of uselessness. The community-generated version is better, but still suffers from issues like significant latency and lack of support for MEC expansion cards. If you're committed to doing this on a shoestring, use the community's drivers, assuming you also have an old install of a DAW (say Cubase 3.0) available that will install on an OS that's old enough for PARIS to run on.
