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Re: Repeater - "conditional stop"



At 01:20 PM 7/26/2003, Nic Roozeboom wrote:
>I imagined it would be only a matter of time before someone would 
>announce 
>they had hacked OS1.1, and made all sorts of improvements... such as 
>being 
>able to configure one track as a MIDI looper...

yes, it's amazing. It can't be that hard. Maybe you could take it on? 
After 
all, the Repeater is only a fully custom piece of hardware with its own 
unique system architecture, and code running straight on the silicon 
probably without any commercial OS in between. But that just means you 
gotta know how the hardware works to write the code and there's no OS 
there 
to do anything for you. Of course, no documentation is publicly available 
on the hardware architecture or the programmable logic parts. But heck, 
with a little patience, a multimeter, logic analyzer, scope, and a year or 
two of spare time you could probably figure out most of it. Then I guess 
you would have to decompile the machine code from the roms into 
undocumented assembler or maybe even C code. I don't know how well 
decompilers work, but probably the result will be messy and difficult for 
humans to understand. Hey, but no matter, if you had all the time to 
figure 
out the hardware, you've got time to unravel the code too! I bet it would 
be fun. Once you've got that figured out, then you can go about adding 
your 
own features. Careful now! this ain't wimpy windows programming. Real-time 
embedded coding without a net! Everything you do has the potential to 
throw 
something else off, so you need to keep an eye on every clock cycle and 
all 
the possible states you could be in. Judging by the kind of bugs they had, 
there probably aren't many cycles left to play with, but there must be a 
few here and there. The Electrix guys only went a year over schedule and 
still had bugs trying to do this, so it can't be that hard really. Oh, by 
the way, did you catch the time when Electrix mentioned they were out of 
code space? Ah well, there are probably a few features in there you don't 
use anyway, so rip 'em out! Assuming you can actually figure out which 
part 
of the code they're in...

Sounds like a great project!

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com