Elektron Musical Instruments

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, andrew sargeant wrote:

> From: "andrew sargeant" <androo@...>
> 
> >Sounds very unlikely. If the SidStation receives illegal MIDI messages it
> >will reset.
> 
> would it be better if it just ignored illegal midi messages? i have a nord
> micro and it never resets itself ...

The thing is that illegal MIDI should never occur. The SidStation ignores
illegal messages when it can, but when illegal bytes are received in the
middle of a message it starts getting dangerous. The SidStation gets out
of sync, and I choose to reset the machine. But this never happens in
normal use, only if the MIDI chords are inserted/removed in the middle of
a message. And this is not dangerous - you only get the chance of a reset.

It's better to handle a critical situation than to ignore it. 

> (not knocking the sidstation, i've only had it reset once)..

After the update I hope it will never reset anymore.

> >The SidStation ignores Active sensing! :)
> 
> what is active sensing? ... monitoring controller data?

Some synths/sequencers send an Active sensing byte every now and then to
tell that it's there ($FE if I remember correctly). Modules attached can
take action (muting itself) if active sensing suddenly dissappears,
because that means that the MIDI connection probably is broken. But I
don't know of any instrument that actually uses it.

> >Mystery crashes are hard to avoid. Could be that the same thing that got
> >your PC to crash also crashed the SidStation (really high electromagnetic
> >interference, or power supply failure).
> 
> weird that a synth can 'crash' .. it's like a computer :)

It _is_ a computer! With an operating system, graphics subsystem etc just
lika a computer. Only so much more devoted to one single thing, and using
it's resources much better (try booting Windows on a 2MHz 8/16-bit
processor with 32k ROM 32k RAM! :). 

Computer controlled it is! :)

   __
__///Daniel Hansson           |   SidStation - MOS6581 Synthesis
\XX/ daniel@...   |         www.sidstation.com