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

Trying to be nice to Korg here, I think that the MDK rom kit for the Poly-800 was someone in sales/marketing saying "how can you guys give the EX-800 sysex dump and not be able to do that in the Poly-800?".

And the engineers reply "look, the ROM storage is only 8K and there just isn't any space left in it for sysex".

Sales/marketing says "well, I don't care what you do, but you better make it available for the Poly-800".

So the engineers (who at this point have little interest in the Poly-800 because they're already working on the DW-8000 and are so far past their deadlines that they have to kludge the DW-6000 first) give the job to the new apprentice saying "I don't care how you do it, just make it happen within four weeks. We have more important things for you to be doing."

So the apprentice goes over to the software developers and they say "we're working on the DW-8000/6000, we don't give a damn about that silly Poly-800 anymore. So we are NOT, I repeat, NOT going to do anymore software development on that dang thing".

So the apprentice is stuck with making it happen while at the same time having to use any existing code.

So he designs a board that will work in the Poly-800MK1 but uses the same EPROM/code as used in the MK2 because he figures he can atleast get the developers to just disable the MK2 EQ and EFX code if he needs to.

Problem solved. Meanwhile, your Poly-800 looks like a bomb went off inside of it.

Whereas, I had the luxury of saying to myself "What is the best way I can think of to do this, I can do whatever I want!"

Mind you, a few savvy engineers have already pointed out some shortcomings of my engineering effort too. For example, I really should have used 62256 and 28C256 RAM and ROM chips. There's really no need to use so much real estate for the old 8K chips.

And using a CR2032 battery instead of just writing the patches into flash? What was I thinking?

So there really is always a better way. It's just those sales/marketing departments that get in the way. I respect the Korg engineers. They have produced some of the best synthesizers of our time.

Mike.