[sdiy-interim] Europa (Re: EPROM Armageddon?)

[J.D. McEachin]

At 12:59 AM 3/28/2007 -0400, Amos wrote:

>Mr. Schrieber is apparently in touch with the folks at Synthcom
>Systems, makers of the incredibly wonderful Europa upgrade for the
>Jupiter-6... 

Yes he has, but then, so have you.  The folks at Synthcom Systems have been subscribed to this list for most of its existence, as every good synth hacker should be.  ;)


>I wonder if Synthcom has any plans in the works for a Jupiter-8 upgrade?

No, sorry, we decided it's a saturated market.  Fewer JP-8s were manufactured, and a lot more midi upgrades were available for it.  The DCB-equipped models could use Roland's Midi<>DCB converter.  Kenton, Groove, Encore, and at least one more manufacturer released upgrade kits.  Encore still makes theirs, and I regularly recommend it to JP-8 owners, because I get asked about JP-8 upgrades surprisingly often.  See http://www.encoreelectronics.com/cont_jp8mk.html .


>I don't know nearly as much about the architecture of the "8" to know
>if there are significant obstacles to such an upgrade... but since the
>JP8 uses scanned panel controls and patch memory, methinks a new CPU
>could be made to work.  Not a task for lightweights, but Synthcom are
>no lightweights... :-)

Thanks for the compliments!  It's been a while since I popped the hood on the JP-8, but I know it has a fairly different architecture from the JP-6.  AFAIR, its voice boards are all analog.  The JP-6's use 8051 microcontrollers on its two voice boards to handle tuning, envelope generation, and lfo generation.


>Speaking of; anyone on-list used Synthcom's MOTM-650 4-channel MIDI-CV?

That's SynthTECH's MOTM-650.  Paul Schreiber designed the hardware; we designed the firmware.  It's based on the Europa codebase.  We just added some routines to control the DACs and display menus on the LCD.

Jeffrey


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