[sdiy] Xpander

[Tom Wiltshire]

> On 18 Oct 2020, at 21:07, Gordonjcp <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 12:20:00PM +0100, Tom Wiltshire wrote:
>> The Prophet T8 worked the same way, with the main processor writing to a common RAM area shared with the voice (“final”) processor.
>> 
>> Given the speed of serial comms at the time, it makes a lot of sense. In many ways it *still* makes a lot of sense.
> 
> I don't know, the Juno 106 communicates between the main CPU and the voice CPU at MIDI speeds but with only two-byte messages.
> 
> Nobody's ever accused the 106 of being laggy.

Fair enough. The truth is that humans are really slow, so parameter updates don’t have to be that fast. As long as those note on/off messages get through in a timely manner, probably no-one will notice.

Still, parallel comms is always going to be faster, and I like the “transparency” of using a shared RAM to get data from one system to the other. It’s quite neat, in a rather 1980’s way!