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

Speaking of which... What's the purpose of the FPGA? I/O? UART? Audio?
As far as I understand (I'm no tech-head by far and my maths, you and 
I don't want to hear about :), it's reconfigurable on the fly depending 
on what it's used for. But I thought the Coldfire would handle quite a 
lot of things in there.

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

Aaron Eppolito wrote:
> We made all of the ASICs.  There is the occasional other chip on 
> there like the control CPU (motorola) and the Xilinx FPGA (but of 
> course, you have to program those!), but all of the 7 ASICs on there 
> are ours.
-- 
Sebastien,
-=-=-=-=-=
I used to be schizophrenic, but we're all right now.

--- "->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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Don't you love gear talk? :)
Thanks a bunch Aaron!

Aaron Eppolito wrote:
> This may be beyond what this list is interested in...
-- 
Sebastien,
-=-=-=-=-=
I used to be schizophrenic, but we're all right now.
 
mailto:poumtschak@... -=- ICQ# 6030405
http://poumtschak.free.fr/ (a few Mp3 in bulk...)
http://www.mp3.com/unpretentious