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

Hi all,

Well, if there's one thing I've learned it's that you should never use
polls to make decisions because you can be sure that poll questions
were written and scripted by an idiot.

OK, down to business.

After looking at the poll results and seeing some of the responses I
was prompted to rethink the goals of the project. Taking into
consideration all of the work I've done so far and the progress made
it would be possible to take all of the new sysex functions (and more)
and put them into ROM space if we could add just one additional 8K
ROM. The challenge is to add that ROM without requiring major surgery
on the hardware. Well it turns out that a small board that would use
two 8K ROM's and one XOR logic gate chip could be made that would map
the second ROM into the same address space as the existing RAM. The
second ROM would be disabled for the low 2K of address space where the
2K RAM exists. This would mean that we would end up with 14K or ROM
instead of the existing 8K. The only problem with this concept is that
we don't get any additional RAM at all. This would mean that any new
sysex commands would have to be wedged into the existing RAM in such
as way as to not stomp all over the existing programming. I'll have to
do some testing to see what scratch RAM is available in that little 2K
RAM chip.

Then, there is the big retrofit project. This will give us so much
additional RAM, ROM and other hardware that we'll be able to transform
the Poly 800 and EX800 into something much more than we could ever
have imagined. It requires removing one IC and adding a much larger
plug in board. It will include two flash EEPROM's which means we'll be
able to download new code as it becomes available. And it will have
many new performance parameters and operational capabilities.

I think perhaps I should go for the easier retrofit kit first and go
from there.

Mike.