Midget started out as a small hobby project in 1999. At the time, my main project was a program called "Board", a primitive MS-DOS program which turned the computer keyboard into a MIDI keyboard with support for most of the standard MIDI controllers.

From the start, I had intended on adding recording and playback capabilities to Board, but it would've meant restructuring the whole program. Besides, playing music using the computer keyboard isn't ideal. So I decided to start a new project - initially called "Board 2". The early beta versions of Midget actually had this as the title. The decision to change name was primarily due to the project going in a different direction to the original Board.

The earliest version still in public distribution appears to be Midget 1.2, although 1.1 may still exist out there somewhere. These early versions had a lot of roughly implemented features, and were difficult to revise/expand. A cut-down unofficial version also existed, which basically had no graphics and only had support for the internal PC speaker. This was intended for use on older machines.

After the initial version, there were several revisions - mostly including new features and improving existing ones. The change logs for each minor version tended to be quite extensive, but the most notable improvement in the later revisions was the inclusion of a mouse-driven menu.

A desire to improve the overall look and feel of Midget inspired the foundations of Midget 2 to be laid. Previous versions of Midget had the GUI bolted on top of the existing program - it was far from an ideal solution, and although it worked, that was about as much as you could say about it.

So Midget 2 was written from scratch, and sits on top of a rudimentary GUI framework which was designed to mimic the most common GUI controls - mainly windows, menus, buttons and list boxes. There are even dialog windows for file loading and saving (replacing the text-mode file selector from older versions.) It's only able to display a main window and one child window - a limitation of the design. It was all Midget really needed to use, anyway.

The end result appeared in early 2000 - Midget with a more polished look/feel. It's still not entirely perfect, but good enough that it only really needed a few very minor tweaks. Plus, I really wanted to evolve Midget into something that would work in Windows.

Midget 3.0 was released in 2001, although development was hampered by a severe bug in the timing code, which would cause Midget to crash when adjusting the tempo.

After many attempts at recreating the original Midget interface in Windows, I just stuck with using an adapted grid and made it mimic the original tracker-style interface used by Midget 2. It does look very different to the DOS versions - a side-effect of it being a "real" GUI application. By now, a few limitations in the program were obvious, and there were plans to correct these. The new version was to be called Midget 4.

There were more prototypes for this than I care to remember. The design stayed mostly the same throughout these, but the main thing I was aiming for was a cleaner, smoother user interface, as opposed to something that looked like it'd been ripped straight out of MS-DOS!

Among the features list for Midget 4 were:

• Plug-in modules (file formats, device support)
• A MIDI device manager with integrated patch list editing
• Network editing
• Simultaneous multiple MIDI device support

...A tall order for a small project! The design of Midget 4 was worked on for quite a long time, although an end product never materialised.

While working on Midget 4, a few of the interface improvements were applied to Midget 3. Some of the minor features from Midget 4 were also integrated. The result was intended to bridge the gap between version 3 and 4, and was released as Midget 3.5 in 2002. There were several minor adjustments to the code, and a major bug was fixed in the final beta release (which never made it to an official release.) The last update was released in early 2005.

Midget 4 underwent major changes as the project changed direction, as Board had done when it became known as Midget. The tracker-style interface was still there, but the concept was mostly different. Some of the interface ideas from Midget 3 and 4 were re-used, and the intended result was a more "modern" style of music program, where it would be possible to edit music in different ways.