Hi Poly People,
The link below takes you to the progress blog page. Over the weekend I
bit the bullet and took my EX800 apart so that I could begin
preparation work for the prototype ROM/RAM upgrade. There's a photo
there showing the prototype board plugged into the ROM socket. The
only really difficult part of the whole modification is the need to
remove IC29 which is the 74H138 address decoder chip. I successfully
removed it and replaced it with a 16 pin IC socket. But doing that
kind of work always gives me the heebeegeebees.
http://patrioticduo.tripod.com/korgpoly800ex800mkiii/id13.htmlThe second little board is sitting right over the top of the IC29
socket. The mod will use a IDC dip plug to get the address lines onto
the main mod board.
I should have the new RAM and ROM sockets installed and wired up over
the next week or two.
On the software side of things, I added a few more extra sysex
functions to try to help with the deciphering of Korg's use of memory
and patches. I really want to try to work out how to send and receive
single patch sysex's. I think that would give quite a few more people
an incentive to write a real patch editor.
Oh and I also discovered some pin compatible 8K EEPROM's. So I ordered
a bunch of those. Using EEPROM's will then mean that we can send new
code into the EX800 any time we want.
Mike.