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undothis
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From my experience as an Ambika builder I would always recommend going local - find someone near you, in your country or - if you are inside the EU - someone from there. It is so much easier to troubleshoot / get help from people that are close by. Having to send a non-working unit around (and even worse, across toll borders) is a drag, no matter whose fault the problem is or what causes the problem. So, where are you located?

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  • 4 months later...

Let me ask the same. I've got working midibox. It actually does't have any controls nor display. Pure box with connections. I can't even imaging what are you talking about on this forum, cause I'm a a musician.

 

Would be nice to add a control panel and display to my unit. In current condition it's useless in live situations and painfull to use in studio.

 

Anyone willing to help?

 

My location is Poland.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yes, there are only some wired electronics inside the original c64 box, 2 midi interfaces (one for kind of wavetable things) and according audio inputs. All is poorly made but works. That's it.

So actually there's posiibility to play and a bit control by masterkeyboard (but it's quiet painful to assign controllers). This causes the unit is almost useless. Without display I can't easily search any presets and without controllers these presets are almost imposiible to edit (not speaking of live situations at all :/)

Can you manage C_04 (or anyone)?

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1H6qtGljFlnc2RpbDVjY2s1cUk/edit?usp=docslist_api

Edited by Wylany
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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry for my late reply.

Anyway HI:)

I cant see brightly whats inside but i see some wires which may be these you need to connect LCD. These boards looks like custom - made. So i cant say anymore. If you need/want to have control panel you will need also declare what is a must have to you. As you can see in my topic "sido - simpler than sammich" i decided that i will not need more than one encoder and some few buttons. I did it just because these controllers in SID MIDIBOX are not 1:1 comaptible with these standard midi controllers. For example SID MIDIBOX has 255 steps of filter cutoff - midi controllers has only 127 steps. So from my point of view here is better to use some external controller via midi cable.

 

If you could make better and closer pictures of your pcbs to figure out whats it - each of them - then we could discuss how hard will be to clean this mess:)

I have somewhere few pcbs of my control boards for SIDO. Fixing them is just to solder 2 unconnected points.  But thats not the end - setup file must be also uploaded into your system. I think it will be necessary in any case because we dont know which setup you already have. 

 

Anyway you are able to connect if i remember correctly 16 of registers which means 8 switches each or 4 encoders. You cannot use only encoders because some system control buttons are necessary like shift... etc. 8 leds/8 switches/5 pots may be connected directly to PIC uC.

 

Cheers

C_04 

 

P.S. I magnified this picture and i see there toroid trafo (i think) 2 pcbs on the left side - core pcb and sid pcb. I cant recognize pcbs on right. Especially behind where were function buttons originally. One pcb also is hidden in the middle top. Thats probably some part of power supply because looks like 2 capacitors there. This ribbon cable is probably not for LCD but for control surface. What is missing also here is some memory bank. Maybe its somehow mounted behind that front part of enclosure.  Definitely i need more pics. One i can say - how you can know which version of MBSID somebody tried to build? Try to guess;) I must to be sure what you have inside this enclosure. If there are only simple boards for basic setup then will be relatively easy manage it. If you have some freak boards then i have to find how to set and operate them in setup.asm and thats long  work.  Which city/town are you located? Im in Sosnowiec/slaskie.

Edited by C_04
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Ok ive seen them. I still cant say whats that third pcb. I think its really possible that will be opl3 synthesis - FM from YAMAHA. So in this case you have two synths in one pack;)

Could you read mios version? There is 1,... and what? Now we have 1,9h but 1,9g also works fine. Your uC is 18F452 and now we use mainly 18F4685. Upload new mios here will be no problem, im not sure about setup.

As i expected these cables were connected for future control surface, lcd has only soldered connector. 

So i could prepare for you LCD for example 2002 + IDC connector. You will need solder nothing. Bigger problem here is control surface. Ive no idea about your setup. Probably its one of these available to upload - nothing custom. Second even more problematic is this FM synth. There will be necessary to build everything the same way. 

You may contact me PM and use polish language if you able.

Cheers

Edited by C_04
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  • 6 months later...

So, after all these months I messaged with C_04 A LOT (!) I must say this man knows what is going on in midiboxes. I sent him my box and he confirmed what was suspected in preview post - there were 2 chips in one box, the second one is opl3.

We decided to make SID first and it's done already. I called it Giana :-) I was looking for name which would remind me the mood of '80 and would refer to typical C64 sounds. By the way I thik it's sexy to call this unit Giana.

 

In its construction it is usual MIDIBOX SID and it was from beginnig, when I'v got it from a friend of mine. What I needed was a panel and an enclosure. So C-04 has built a panel and corrected some messy electronics and I've designed and built an enclosure with a help from my couple of friends. There are some imperfections in enclosure but this was my first job in this field so... not so bad I think. Design of this device is also a kind of '80 but not typical C64 style. It was inspired by other gear from this age including wooden sides, which brings a little bit of analogness ;-)

 

Here is a kind of slideshow movie showing making of Giana. A soundtrack is totally played on Giana (with a couple of fx added from cubase). And soon the MIDIBOX FM should be ready so keep tuned :-)

 

And once again thank you C-04!

 

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