Happy 2023! Hopefully this year will be better than the last few years have been.
As you’ve probably gathered, there hasn’t been much going on here. COVID has impacted the supply chain so it’s become more difficult and expensive to produce PCB’s. Therefore, I won’t be doing anything new for a while.
The DSS-1 upgrade is essentially discontinued. Since I was building them myself, I found it took around 7 hours to assemble, test, program, modify existing boards, etc. per kit. And there are some outstanding software issues which I don’t expect to be fixed anytime soon. So I’ve opted to focus my efforts on a different approach to the upgrade. However, I don’t expect to make progress on this (or the DSM-1) anytime soon.
I do still have the following:
ASR-10 SCSI and digital I/O, EPS-16 SCSI and Flash Bank, and CEM5530 replacement modules
In addition I will no longer offer repair services to equipment (other than the boards that I have sold).
Hi Tom, what are the outstanding issues with the DSS-1 upgrade firmware? I’ve had mine for about 20 months and haven’t noticed anything funky, but I also haven’t been too demanding of it. Would be nice to know what I should look out for. Thanks!
The most glaring issue is that some third party DSS-1 disks won’t load correctly due to illegal characters (by FAT16 standards) in the file names. Also, it the mod doesn’t work correctly with some OLED displays. Finally, I found an issue where audio is distorted when you play too many notes near the ‘top key’ of a sample. This appears to be a heat related hardware issue with the custom Korg IC’s. Whether this could be mitigated in software, I don’t know – or if it only happens with the upgraded software.
I’m so happy to see your progress and you’re safe.