Leaderboard

Too much limited for me, no merging or distribution, no channel routing, muting or other event filtering. I want mOoooore ;)

Glad to hear of your interest! The front panel is definitely a big hurdle. I have two versions of this project for those who want to do something but not build the front panel: MIDIbox VGM Player and MIDIbox Genesis Tracker. However, it sounds like these two might not have the functionality you're looking for. There is no version which provides the complete synth engine and all the capabilities but not the whole front panel. The controls exist to edit things and give the user feedback about them--having all of this stuff editable from menus would not only make it very difficult to use, but would require a lot of changes to the interface software. It's not too much of a stretch to say that the synth exists primarily to be a set of nice front panel controls for messing with the Genesis chips. In retrospect I understand that this made a high barrier to entry, but this is the box I wanted to build. The aluminum is a major cost, but it is not strictly necessary--since the whole front panel is on one large PCB, you can just use that as the front panel, though it's not as nice. If you would like to go this route I can gather interest and have another round of front panel PCBs manufactured, and sell you one for a reasonable price (under $100). There would be about 10-15 hours of soldering things (like the 638 LEDs) onto it, but that's all pretty straightforward. (And since you would not be using LEDs which have to be ultra-bright to shine through the translucent plastic, you could use cheap LEDs for all of them.) All that's left after that are the Genesis modules (which should still be for sale on the MIDIbox Shop--let me know if they're out) and the core, all of which are not very expensive or time-consuming. If you don't want to do this, I would suggest you build MIDIbox Genesis Tracker and control the synth from your computer. I had a working build of this firmware at one point, but I've since made lots of changes to the VGM module API and not updated this project, so it won't work as is--but if you want to do this I would be happy to get the code working again for you.