Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Hi Poly Fans,

Well not much of an update but how about a little confidence booster.

Summer is OVER! And that can mean only one thing. Lot's of time will
be available for me (and hopefully you) to continue disassembly of the
Poly.

However, I'm beginning to think that it might be just as much fun or
even more fun to just rewrite the code from the ground up! In fact, I
was thinking along the lines of making the project an open source
project. You see, my kids are homeschooled so I am always being asked
what I am up to in my little lab. And I was thinking that it would be
extremely educational for my kids to actually learn what it's like to
program a microcontroller in a synthesizer situation.

Although I think there is still a lot to be gained from me continuing
to disassemble the Poly code, I am contemplating creating a little
boot loader that will allow me to send an entire RAM image down MIDI
(not even sysex but a specially crafted upload) to the Poly. Then,
once the code is downloaded the Poly would boot the code. This would
give us the advantage of being able to write whatever we like on an
assembler, heck we could write it all in C if we like. And once we are
happy that the code is solid and bug free (running in RAM) then we can
commit the code to EPROM.

So far, I've probably spent about 10 to 15 hours on disassembly. It
doesn't sound like much but what I've learned in that time is that
disassembly without a memory map is really, really difficult. And the
other big thing I've learned from it is that it might be easier to
just rewrite the whole thing. I mean, who the heck cares about the
sequencer anyway. So why bother trying to disassemble that? Except
that, to disassemble the rest means disassembling it all. Kind of painful.

The only question is, how many software engineer people do we have on
this list who would be willing to contribute valuable and precious
time to coding in assembler or C?

If we went the open source route then I would just sell the hardware
retrofit kit and make the code free.

Mike.