Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Hi Poly owners,

The new batch of HAWK-800 and AtomaHawk boards have come in.

The AtomaHawk has a small correction on it. Other than that, the
AtomaHawk is no different to previous versions.

The HAWK-800 has some important differences to the previous board design.

First of all, the new board is double sided so that there's no need to
install jumpers (well actually, there are now only three jumpers).

Second, the board has been designed to support the Poly-800 MK2. I've
not had a chance to test it yet in a MK2 yet since I am still waiting
on some more chips to arrive but I am confident it will work just
fine. The most time consuming part of the MK2 kit is about to begin
which is the software development to support the MK2 echo and EQ. This
will probably take a few months to do.

Third, the new board is designed to support a bank switched flash rom.
This will allow implementing parameter banks (probably four banks)!

You may not see much in the way of new features being implemented
right now. There's a very important reason for this. We are almost out
of flash memory which means there's virtually no room for new
features. So I've been slowly working on moving all of the patch,
global and sequencer data into flash rom areas. Once that is
completed, I'll be asking all HAWK-800 customers to obtain an
additional flash rom that will replace one of the static rams. And a
new version of the firmware will come out that is both MK2 ready and
uses only flash memory for patch storage.

I will make a paypal option available on the web site for obtaining
the additional flash rom. And I will keep the old firmware available
for those who choose not to upgrade (not a good idea).

However, the new version of the firmware will use different SYSEX for
patches because the patches will be much larger than they currently
are. That is because we need somewhere to put the EQ and efx
parameters. Also, as part of the general firmware upgrade, we need
more parameters and space to support new features (such as EG accenting!).

So sometime this year, there will be a large firmware upgrade that
will alter the patch sysex format. I will make a software utility
available that will remap the old patch format to the new format for
those of you (and me) who already have patches saved in the old format.

And finally, storing patches to tape will be gone forever!

For those of you who are not familiar with the HAWK-800 kit, check out
www.hawk800.com

Cheers,

Mike.