Hoax Synth

[offroad]

Hi,

 

maybe on the edge of off-topic here: Thinking about future Papilio for some Retrocade-ish open source synth:

 

Here http://wiki.keyboardpartner.de/index.php?title=HX3_MIDI_expander_module

is a commercial project ("Hoax") that emulates a Hammond B3 organ to a level of detail that it's practically indistinguishable from the real deal. It's fairly open (but not open source - business model appears to be to license the "IP", for a very reasonable price though), the schematic shows a Spartan 3 XC3S700A.

From a performance point-of-view, it seems not that far off the existing Papilio Pro board

 

"Hoax":

20 DSP 6k slices, 360k RAM, 13k logic cells

vs

Papilio Pro:

18 DSP 576k RAM, 9k logic cells

 

An accurate comparison is not that straightforward (the LUT architecture differs). My point here is that the Papilio Pro might be very well capable of implementing a pro-level specialized synth. A bigger FPGA is always nice, but what I'm saying is it's not mandatory to implement some "wow" project.

 

Thinking of it.. one interesting feature could be a SATA interface to strap the board to the cheapest 60G SSD harddisk for crazy fast streaming data. But I haven't looked deeper into that yet, can't say how hard SATA is to use without proprietary IP.