Native Instruments Kontrol S61 vs. older Scope-Pulsar setup

[Gary_101]

hi Folks,

been out of the flow for a few years doing DAW work with my old Scope-Pulsar setup, and I'm looking to upgrade my old Korg Trinity to a spiffy new keyboard from Native Instruments called the Kontrol S61. Trouble is, I'm not sure if my old Dell computer (OPTIPLEX 760) running Windows 7 + my old Pulsars 1+2 cards in parallel are up to date enough to deal with the new Keyboard.

here are the tech spec's of the S61:

System Requirements
• MIDI 2.0 compatible
• Intel Core i5, Apple M1 (and equivalent or higher)
• macOS 13 (Ventura) or higher (compatible iwth macOS 12 in MIDI 1.0 mode)
• Windows 10 (latest service pack) or higher
• 8 GB RAM
• An internet connection and a graphics card that supports Direct 3D 11.1 (feature level 11.0) or higher are required to download and activate this product. Once installed and activated, the product can be used offline.

I kept my old Dell PC alive just to work on my Scope-Pulsar music setup. I switched my daytime computers to Mac platform 12 years ago, and prefer everything in Mac now. Newest Mac is a 2020 27" iMac, which would likely run macOS 14. Trouble is, my old Pulsar cards require PCI slots, which iMacs do not have, and is there any iMac compatible software put out by scope that would run my old Pulsar cards on some kind of PCI interface that would connect to my iMac?

Sorry for all the questions, but i'm in my 70's and my old brain has a hard time keeping up with new technology. But that S61 keyboard looks very cool for an affordable price!

Thanks for any help

Gary

[Gary_101]

quick addition: I'm running SCOPE v5.1 (just reallzed it's 10 years old!) My 1st Pulsar I card is probably 30 years old! Yikes!

[valis]

If you route the keyboard through the DAW first (ie, connecting via USB) and then back out to the Scope software midi driver, things should work fine.

[nebelfuerst]

Connecting a pci card to your Mac will not work. Even if you would find some exotic adapters on hardware level (like Magmas), there is no software on Mac to handle scope. As Mac changed its cpu several times (68xxx, PPC, Intel, Arm), using old software is a nightmare.
So my suggestion is to keep the Dell unchanged and just feed Midi-data to it. As Midi is a long term standard, even a new keyboard should work with very old hardware, so you just connect midi-out of the keyboard to midi-in of scope.
As valis wrote, you could also use the Mac to interface the keyboard , where you could filter unrequired midi-codes and then feed it to scope by midi cable.