marczellm Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 My father who used to work for Roland just casually recalled that the Roland W-30 (1988) had "Open Architecture", meaning that the operating system came on external floppy disks, which means savvy people could write new software to enable it to do more things. Does anyone have recollections whether that ever happened? Quote Life is subtractive.Genres: Jazz, funk, pop, Christian worship, BebHop Wishlist: 80s-ish (synth)pop, symph pop, prog rock, fusion, musical theatre Gear: NS2 + JUNO-G. KingKORG. SP6 at church. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CowboyNQ Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 I used to own a W-30 and certainly remember the 3.5' floppies. Dunno about any enhanced super hacks though. Sounds plausible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Threadslayer Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 Roland and Open Architecture would seem to be mutually exclusive terms based on my experience with them - in the 1980s - as well as later on. Do you mean to say that they distributed the operating system SOURCE on disk? That would have been an extraordinary departure from their normal practice... If true, I wish I'd heard about it at the time. I remember going down to their headquarters in Commerce? Ca back in the '80s and cajoling a couple of their engineers into selling me a copy of the maintenance manual and schematics for my Jupiter 4 and later the JX-3P out the back door, but there was never any source code on offer. Quote Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. -Mark Twain Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baldwin Funster Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 The Dexed dx7 project is open source. It's not roland or yamaha but it's cool if you know what to do with it. Which I dont. Quote FunMachine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan Hughes Posted January 17, 2021 Share Posted January 17, 2021 My friend bought an Ensoniq ASR-10 in the early 90s (and still uses it). I remember that he was able to get some floppies that added new features (he had to have his mom write a check and send it to the address in an ad in the user group newsletter!). If I recall, he was able to add in a resonant filter, and a vocoder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marczellm Posted January 17, 2021 Author Share Posted January 17, 2021 Do you mean to say that they distributed the operating system SOURCE on disk? Nope, but just the fact that the instrument loads software from a disk means that someone determined enough could reverse engineer it much easier. Quote Life is subtractive.Genres: Jazz, funk, pop, Christian worship, BebHop Wishlist: 80s-ish (synth)pop, symph pop, prog rock, fusion, musical theatre Gear: NS2 + JUNO-G. KingKORG. SP6 at church. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brenner13 Posted January 18, 2021 Share Posted January 18, 2021 Just another short-lived Roland series sold with the promise of 'non-obsolescence' with their 'open architecture' software. In 1988, I bought in with the S-550, the predecessor of the W-30, only to have Roland drop support for it with the release of the S-7xx series two short years later. Still have the S-550 (and a second one) with the proprietary add-on sequencer software, and the RC-100 wired remote control, and a couple of shoe boxes full with discs of samples and sequences. The proprietary mouse developed a terrible short and is a total pain in the patootie to use the system without it. Roland switched the wires around in the connector so no other mouse will work with it...ERG! Back in the day the system was total cutting edge and I composed a bunch of fun stuff and several original scores to several local theater productions. Probably the peak of of my creative years. It was a great tool then and still produces unique raw sounds, but takes painstaking patience to load up disks and program sequences. Today"s tools are immensely easy to use by comparison. Shoot, this iPad has more processing power than a thousand S-550"s. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TyPie Posted January 20, 2021 Share Posted January 20, 2021 I still have mine! Mint condition! I believe this was one of the earliest all-in-one 'workstations', if not the first, to combine a synth, sampler & sequencer in one box. Ahhhh, the fondest of memories. Great machine for its time. Yes, the OS 'system' is on a floppy disk (The 'System' Disk). Sound libraries are still available, also on floppies. The only 'hacks' I am aware of, is that the floppy drive can be replaced / converted to a USB drive, with the System Disk and sound libraries now available on a USB stick. Roland sampler data & sounds of that era can also be read and manipulated by the W-30. (I haven't made the conversion.).Parts, the drives, sound libraries, scsi conversion kit, and updated chip all appear to be available if you look around a bit. I don't know of any hacks to the software, though. May be capable of being hacked, but even today's keyboards most likely have the built-in capability to do more than what we are fed, I think. This site may have additional info: The W-30 Page Quote "You're either WITH me, or you're AGIN' Me!" (Yosemite Sam) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mate stubb Posted January 21, 2021 Share Posted January 21, 2021 The operating system is going to be written in undocumented assembly language for an obsolete processor. In addition, it most likely occupies every spare byte of system ram allocated to it. Chances for enhancing the OS are going to be slim to none. Quote Moe --- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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