Mikkel

Try lighting the plexi from the side. If it works, it's much easier, and this is how it's usually done when you want engraved characters in plexi to light up.

Very nice build. Did you use a finished solution or did you figure out a solution yourself to scan the keys? I have been wanting to build something similar myself, and I am a bit unsure on what solution I'll choose for this. Also, nice Hammond, is it an M3? I'm surprised nobody has commented on that yet. Anders M.

Hello. If I am not mistaken, you are limited by how many digital inputs MIOS can handle. This limit is 128 digital inputs. A button takes up one input and an encoder takes up two. This puts the limit at 64 encoders, if you don't have any buttons at all. With 50 encoders, there's also room for 28 buttons. Customizing the firmware to work with the encoders is not very hard, take a look in the relevant setup_-file, setup_8580.asm if you are using 6582s, see the bottom of the file, and particularly cs_menu_enc_table.inc in /src. Anders M. edit by nILS: Whoops, sorry, hit edit instead of quote ;)

Both of them are off. Anders M.

I have discovered some odd behavior with the arpeggiator. I am running MbSID V2.0RC27. To make this error appear: *Enable a patch that uses the arpeggiator, for example "Arpeggio" from the default patches. *Play an A-minor chord starting with A3, the A in the middle of a 49-key keyboard. A-C-E. *Release the E, the arpeggiator is still playing A-C-E as EXP_ARP_BEHAVIOUR in sid_midi.inc set to 1 (default). *While still holding the A and C, use the finger that used to be on the E to play an F, the arpeggiator is now playing A-C-F. So far, everything is as it should be. *Start with the same A-minor chord, then release the A. *While still holding the C and E, use the finger that used to be on the A to play a G. *Instead of playing G-C-E, the arpeggiator doesn't drop the A and plays G-A-C-E. This only happens for some particular combinations of keys, it does for example not happen if you do the same thing one octave above, but it does one octave down. Anders M.

Got them on Friday. Thanks.

Thanks for all the tips. Wilba turned out to be right. There was an error in the PIC firmware somewhere. I had almost excluded this option, because I did the update several times without any change. I tried again now and it works perfectly.

Thanks for the quick replies. I am definitely using a PIC18F4685. The bankstick is a 24LC256 with all the address pins tied low. The PIC was programmed with http://tools.asix.net/prg_presto.htm and http://tools.asix.net/dwnld_up.htm I will try adding MIDI out to my MBSID later today.

I have had some strange problems with MBSID. I am running MBSID v2RC18. I am running a single core with a single SID. I am using a minimal control surface on it, with a 2x16 VFD in 8 bit mode. I have one 32kB bankstick attached to it with an address of 0. At first, after I had upgraded it from v1 to v2 (and done the appropriate hardware changes), the arpeggiator and various other functions were not working. I discovered that it was running MIOS 1.9e, I thought that might be the problem, as MIOS 1.9f is recommended. I took a blank PIC, programmed it with the bootloader, uploaded MIOS (doing the code upload in manual mode, as I didn't have a connection between MIDI out on the MBSID and MIDI in on my USB MIDI interface), and then uploaded MBSID v2RC18. Now the arpeggiator and the other functions are working, but I have a few other strange problems. Now, after I turn it on, the ensemble settings are completely messed up. It starts up with ensemble 002 selected. The midi channel for all instruments is set to --, SpU and SpL are set to the same note and transpose is set to 65. Bank is set to H, patch is set 128 and superpoly voices is set to 7. Filter range is set to FFF-FFF. I have tried changing the settings, and saving to E001, but it makes no difference. It still starts up with E002 and messed up settings, and if I change the ensemble to 001, the settings are still messed up, so nothing seems to have been saved. Any suggestions?

Great! Really looking forward to trying it out.

Jeg har bygget meg en Midibox SID. Bilder kommer etter hvert. Har du kommet noe videre?

Great. The Midibox-to-COM sounds like the simplest solution. I found an old PC with a midi port at work today, and managed to connect the 18F452 to it. The PC received the upload request, but I could not get any data through the other way, most likely because I couldn't find a darlington optocoupler and used a normal one. From looking at the datasheets, this optocoupler has a CTR of 50%, which is very low compared to the around 1000% for the 6N138. We'll see what I can find tomorrow. Thanks for the help so far. EDIT: Tried some more with the PC with the midi port, this was hopeless as I couldn't find any suitable optocouplers. Then I tried MB-to-COM, with a USB->COM cable. I changed the ID in the PIC. I opened up a serial port terminal, but I kept receiving E0 00 00 FC 03 03 03 EF every two seconds. The settings were 38400/8/N/1. Then I installed the COM-to-MIDI driver, and set up MIOS studio to use this port, but I received nothing with MIOS studio. At that point I gave up. Then I opened notepad, and manually pasted together all the hex code that was PIC data, I discarded the configuration data and all that. What worries me is that MIOS and MBSID seemed to overlap a couple of places, namely at address 300-331 (lines starting with :10300 to :10331) and 7D0-7DE. At these places, I pasted in the pieces from the MBSID file, since that's the one that's written into the PIC last. EDIT again: Tried out the hex file that I had pasted together. Not surprisingly it didn't work. Had an other go with the MB-to-COM, it turned out I had the wrong PIC ID (annoying that most PIC programming software has a different way of writing the ID). Now it seemed to send the right data, when looking at it with a serial port terminal program. After I changed the serial port settings, the midi over serial driver seemed to work too, and I managed to transfer MIOS and MBSID.

I didn't know if this should be in this forum or in one of the programming forums, so I'm sorry if it's misplaced. Right now, I don't have access to any computers with midi ports, but I have a laptop and a USB PIC programmer. I want to make the Midibox SID, but there seems to be no way of getting MIOS/MBSID into the PIC other than via MIDI. Is it possible to put the bootloader/MIOS/MBSID hex files into one hex file with one of the editors that can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HEX ? If that's too impractical, would it be possible for someone with a PIC with bootloader/MIOS/MBSID to put it in a PIC programmer, read it and send me the file? Also, if I use the Midibox-to-COM interface and write MIOS/MBSID into it this way, will the midi baudrate be fixed to 38400, or is there some clever way to get it back to 31250? I hope you understand what I mean, some of the things were a bit hard to explain Anders M.

I'm also interested in buying two or three 8580s, do you have any left? Anders M.