Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Well more good news from the software upgrade front.

I finally managed to get my binary conversation C program working
correctly. It was one of those maddening problems with my code. I
opened the binary file in text mode instead of binary mode which
caused the binary image file read to fail and I could only get maybe
100 or so bytes into the program instead of the whole binary image. A
quick change from "rt" to "rb" fixed it. It just took me a couple of
hours to find it. Frustrating!

The conversation utility takes an assembly binary file as input and
strips out just the data for the lower or upper EEPROM and writes it
to a file along with the necessary sysex preamble and EOX (F7) at the
end. I then open up MIDI-OX and open the file and send the binary
image straight to the EX800 EEPROM's.

To test that it actually works, I just now took all of the old tape
functions and relocated them back into the first EEPROM. And it
worked! Now I have an EX800 will all of the new sysex functions as
well as the original tape functions.

Now I can get down to writing new EX800 functions again. Only this
time, all I have to do to test the code is run the C utility on the
assembly binary file and then send the code update straight to the
EX800 as a sysex firmware update.

I am over the moon that this all works since I have now finished the
major utility part of the work to upgrade the EX800. The only
remaining utility tasks will be to design the circuit board itself,
put user assembly instructions together, that sort of thing.

The major new tasks will be the fun part of adding new functions to
the EX800.

Won't be long now before I have a kit available to us all.

Mike.