During the COVID I had a bit of time to do what no one wanted to do. Write an emulator for the DX7 microcontroller. That is, EVERYTHING BUT the sound generation. There are lots of virtual DX7’s out there but my passion is hardware. I have tinkered with, made and sold hundreds of DX7 memory expansions, constantly trying to make each new iteration a bit better. It’s quite a challenge because it’s all reverse engineering of old assembler code and there is very little code space left to jam new things into.
Command Line DX7 emulator/simulator shown with companion MIDI test button panel
My latest success is the doubling of the “voice” memory for the SuperMAX+. This is just an advance notice. It exists and works in the simulator and on a test board, but it will be some time before I have new hardware for v3 available for sale (months). The current v2.x has lots of interesting improvements, but still contains the standard 16 banks (512 patches). As mentioned, the new version will be double that: 32 banks (1024 patches). It will be a little bit more expensive, but it will be a monster.
