Message
Re: [xl7] Any interest remaining in a self-programming FLASH SIMM?
2014-07-17 by janoch23@...
What price per module are you aiming for? The lower the better, not because I'm cheap but because every dollar less will mean you can get more pre-orders making it more likely to happen.
My guess is that you would be able to sell anything that allows at least 8MB of user samples, but 128MB is of course a lot better. I would suspect that the difference in interest between 32MB and 128MB is not that big, so if 32MB makes the price lower, that's the way to go. And 32MB should make it possible to duplicate existing ROMs (I mean, for backup, of course...), so, much better than 8MB. Otoh, there probably isn't a lot of difference in price between 32MB and 128MB of chips anyway.
Being able to store user presets is vital, not being able to would be a deal breaker for me. But having to dump your presets via MIDI and manually put them back onto the SD would be ok, although it would be nicer if they were stored back onto the SD when you switched ROMs.
There only exists 23 different ROMs from E-Mu right? So even a 1GB SD card could store all of them and still have plenty of space left for 8 x 32MB user banks. That means having an SD slot for interchangable SD cards is kind of unnecessary, apart from the OS compatibility thing. A standard Mass Storage Device interface would solve this, and libraries are available for many chips.
Personally I am much more interested in user samples than in existing ROMs. I would buy a 1MB device, too!
To save on costs, all configuration could be done via USB. I mean stuff like selecting which 4x32MB images are loaded at bootup, if you go for 128MB. Personally I don't see the need for a "happy sound" to acknowledge successful upload, I would be happy with a "status: ok" in a text file though the MSD, if that keeps costs down.
Mandatory case mods are rarely popular and to be avoided.
You will have a much larger "market" if there is no Ultra sampler necessary, so USB is the way to go.
Like I said in my email, I think crowd funding could work for this type of project.
In any case, just get *anything* out there that supports user samples, and we'll buy! :)