I am not interested in taking on another money losing project, but...
If there are enough people interested who have MIDster punches, it
would be possible to bring them up to date.

There are several ways I can think of but the two most practical
would be driving the machinery with either an Arduino or with a CNC
control program such as Mach3.  I wrote a perforator control program
several years ago that I never finished since I never finished the
perforator and had lost interest.  What I did complete is the
program to convert a MIDI file into line based punch instructions.
Writing an Arduino program to control a few stepper motors from
these files would not be a huge amount of work.

My favorite untested idea would be to convert MIDI to Gcode and
use Mach3 to do all the motion control.  The advantages of this
is that you can buy inexpensive hardware to interface the computer
to the perforator and use Mach3 to do all the stepper control with
acceleration.  Much higher speeds would be possible using Mach3 and
decent stepper drivers.

Similar control can be done with an Arduino and suitable libraries
but more wiring would be required.  The Mach3 solution would be more
plug-and-play, only requiring a program to do the conversion from
MIDI to Gcode.

If others are willing to provide help in other ways, I would probably
be interested in writing this converter.  It will not be a very high
priority but I could probably get it done in reasonable time.

I have a very nice CNC router that I recently got working quite well.
Among other things, it could be used to perforate music rolls if I were
to build a suitable punch.  This would allow me to test the program.

Spencer Chase