VIA board, was: Re: [sdiy] super cheap synthisizers

[Batz Goodfortune]

Y-ellow Linium 'n' all.

At 10:01 PM 6/13/02 +0200, Linium wrote:

> > Besides you can get microATX (also quite small) motherboard Soltek SL-75LIV
> > (also integrated graphics & three PCI & DIMM slots) & Duron900 for less
> > than 150 e/$. If you program your synth using fixed point arithmetics then
> > the Eden might be viable solution.

I'm wondering what would be stopping you putting some wiz bang processor in 
to something like this and run the thing at half speed? This is the kinda 
thing that SGI use to do with their MIPS chips.

The whole thought behind running embedded, real-time linux is "No moving 
parts". But then, you could probably get away with whacking a flash RAM 
drive in that spare slot.

And as for running outboard analogue filters etc, Surely even a 486 equiped 
with suitable analogue ports would be enough to do this kinda thing? I 
wouldn't even attempt to make a home built PCI card but I've butchered a 
number of ISA cards into service over the years.

And here's some pure animal recycling for you. I've never been able to 
afford one of those really cool ISA prototyping cards so I grab an old ISA 
card that's well past it's use-by date and cut the thing down till the 
original device is gone. Leaving an "L" shaped bit with the ISA fingers on 
the bottom and the connectors/back-frame on the back. Then, I 
glue/wire/fuese a lump of prototyping board to that in such a way that if 
gives back it's original strength and "Bob's" your aunty's live in lover.

You might also consider butchering some old Crystal-semiconductor sound 
cards maybe? All the docs are available for them. Granted they're pretty 
crap but if you had any smarts with coding, you could put as many of these 
things in an old 486 as you desired. (Up to the number of ISA slots 
available) And each one has MIDI I/O as well. I've never tried to code a 
driver for anything faster than a 286 before, life's too short, but I've 
often day dreamed about doing just this very thing. And bear in mind that a 
486 processor is a very capable beast really. When it's not got the 
overhead of an M$ OS-bloat to contend with. Many a much loved synth is 
running on processors about one g'zillianth of the power of a 486.

A 486 doesn't need a fan generally. You could run a FLASH if you want or 
use an embedded OS in ROM. Butcher an old keyboard for the front panel 
controls. Use the printer port to control other things.

And for that matter, if you were suitably code inclined, even an old 8088 
board could be pressed into service to control something. I remember a mate 
had this little machine that looked like an ATARI 1040. Single board like 
this VIA thing. (But smaller) Had a single 8 bit ISA slot soldered to the 
edge of the board. Video and floppy on board (No hard drive) and of course 
all the usual array of ports. The idea was that you could drop a NIC in the 
back of this thing and you had a network terminal/net-boot PC. I cant toast 
1 meg ROMs or above but the idea would have been to copy the ROM, find the 
break point in the boot sequence (Which searches for a BASIC A ROM) and 
then start coding your controller from there. I actually have an SDK type 
arrangement to do this kinda thing somewhere. Never tried it but there are 
people who've done stuff like this so there's a precedent already. Man I 
would love to have tiny stock pile of these little suckers I can tell you.

And anything above a 386 is beowulf material. (I'm working on it) I saw on 
Catalyst last night, as part of another story entirely, The guy walking 
though some multi-server beowulf array at some Uni in CA. Basically, 3 
tears of dexian shelving with possibly thousands of identical white boxes 
stacked on them. There must have been half a kilometer of these things if 
they were stretched end to end. I'm sure there would have been just enough 
computing power there for my needs. Well my immediate needs.

One of my 3D colleagues was expounding the virtues of using radiocity. 
That's the process where the light bouncing from surface to surface is 
calculated in a 3D render. Even as little as 4 bounces can take a 30 second 
render out to 2 or 3 minutes. But it looks so good. I commented that all I 
wanted was a box that could render frames in real time using full radiocity 
and about 2 million polygons and all the other stops pulled out.

He quipped that only God has a PC that powerful and that I should go ask 
God and find out what he's using.

Be absolutely Icebox.

PS: but as always, I'm waiting for God to upgrade. :)

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