Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Hi Poly fans,

here is a little update on the HAWK-800 road map.

Great progress has been made toward making the MK2 kit ready. The
HAWK-800 printed circuit board design has been revised to provide
connection to the efx board of the MK2. A small batch of five boards
have been ordered. So I expect to be able to build the first MK2 kit
in February or March at the latest. Then all that will remain to do is
the reverse engineering of the software control of the effects chips.
Also, a significant rewrite of patch management will be required to
support the MK2 additional parameters.

The other issue that was becoming critical was the limited amount of
remaining flash memory. This was a problem that was made even more
critical by using flash memory to backup the patch storage. Well the
good news there is that I've been able to begin the process of
migrating patch storage out of one of the 8K static ram chips by
rewriting all of the patch handling software so that patches are only
ever stored in flash rom. By doing that, we are able to remove one of
the static ram chips and replace it with an additional flash rom. This
gives us back 8K of memory for software features.

And in addition to that, the new board revision supports the use of a
32K flash rom that is bank switchable. This means that one of the 8K
flash roms can be swapped out with a 32K version. As soon as I get
these new boards in I will test the bank switching and if all goes
well then we will have plenty of flash capacity for many, many more
software features.

For those of you who have already purchased the kit, you're not left
out of these improvements. There is a spot on your board to fit the
additional support chip required for the larger flash rom. And the
modification of the board won't be difficult. So all existing HAWK-800
owners will be able to benefit from the new features.

I'll let you all know how things go as I progress.

Mike.