I have been bitten by the retro bug and have resurrected an old Pentium III system for getting access to some GM/GS sound cards I used for music making in the late nineties, as well as a Yamaha TG100 sound module. REAPER runs remarkably well on this Win 98 machine, and ReaControlMIDI is very neat for selecting patches etc.
There's one thing I don't get though. If I close a project and open another one, the hardware remains set to the patches from the previous project and I can't seem to make ReaControlMIDI resend all data without going in and "touching" every parameter in all instances of the plugin. Which is inconvenient to say the least. I know that I can add program changes/cc's for initializing each project, but if I have to do that then what's the point of ReaControlMIDI?
Since I know there's a lot of people here who use REAPER with hardware, I have a strong suspicion that I'm missing something. Either that or you are the most patient people in the world