>Yes, this is my hope as well. In earlier days on this list, when talking
>about MOAS, Paul mentioned wishing to be able to change sequencer
>personalities via software, and to publish source code in a mid level
>language like C for other coders to customize.
I was planning on building a MIDI retrofit for my SCI Pro-1 and
was discouraged from coding in C by someone "in the know". I
know the C compilers weren't that great back in college but I
had hoped with Pentium performance they were better at optimizing.
It looks like I'll be doing all my coding in assembly, or at least
all the MIDI I/O, DAC updates, and keyscanning. Now that's on
a stock 8051. If Paul is using a souped up variant with enough power
you might be able to get away with C. Even if it is in C, it
would be unethical for Paul to share his compiler and assembler
with us, and they ain't cheap.
>Now that we are talking about "Daughter of MOAS", we should revisit this
>issue. The question is, can the proposed DoMOAS system be customized by
>outside software developers? Will the code be in low level assembler, C, or
>what? Does it require an expensive hardware or software emulation
>development system?
You can code 8051 assembly with a cheap $100 development board.
However, if you want to do MIDI I/O on the 8051's internal serial
I/O you're SOL, 'cause that's what the development board is talking
to the host PC on. (Is it just me or is that a lot of anograms?)
I went with a Dataman S4 handheld EPROM programmer and emulator.
It has a serial port for direct connection to a PC. So the process
is assemble code, download to the S4, hit the EMULATE button, and
see if it works. That's not quite as handy as the development
systems, but if you need the serial I/O....... The S4 has enough
memory for storing several EPROMs, so it's great for copying multiple
ROMs out of synths without a PC nearby. Great way to upgrade
the software in SCI P2000s, Prophet VSes, Jupiter-6s, H3000s,
etc, etc.
-Cary