Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

--- "->Nobody<-" <poumtschak@...> wrote:
> Speaking of which... What's the purpose of the FPGA?

"Glue"  =)  With all the chips on there, it helps to tie everything
together, and generally do a lot of miscellaneous little things.

> it's reconfigurable on the fly depending on what it's used for.

This may be beyond what this list is interested in, but while FPGAs are
reprogrammable, it's more of an all-or-nothing thing.  I don't think
you can reconfigure just part of the chip.  Rather, you download an
"image" of what the chip should look like in its entirety.  This
specifies the layout of gates on the chip (FPGA stands for Field
Programmable Gate Array).  It's not really like running a program on a
CPU.

> And, honestly, software or hardware wise, is there some kind of 
> Ensoniq's ASR-X legacy at all in the XX-7?

Hardware, no.  Software, not literally (as in, no code was reused). 
However, I did have an ASR-X Pro in my office that I played with and
read the manual several times to hopefully capture some of the "feel"
of the better parts of the unit.

-Aaron

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