Casio Fx 570 Emulator

[Allison Sturgis]

Eg. Casiotone 401 and MT-40 are controlled by an Intel MCS-48 microcontroller which ROM I successfully dumped. So at least the accompaniment section would be possible to emulate yet. Robin Whittle (firstpr.com) found out much about the Consonant-Vowel synthesis main voice sound ICs in early Casios, which would be useful to emulate them. Also the various Casio calculator emulators on the internet might be useful to understand what kinds of special CPUs Casio has used. Google patent search helped much to get an idea what is going on inside of them. Unfortunately most early main ICs seem to be rather based on general digital logics (networks of gates, counters and flipflops - like a Pong game) than a CPU (software controlled by one central code ROM) in its stricter sense.

I am still working on documenting the pinouts and functions (e.g. key matrix eastereggs) of all 1980th Casio home keyboard special ICs. For this I already have examined all service manuals I could find on free websites. Unfortunately there aren't many about first generation Casios. (If you need info, e-mail me.)

I also own a dead SK-200 (from eBay,someone elses circuit-bending-corpse); after disabling the auto-power-off (to make it turn on),only all lights flicker wildly and there is some bus activity (seen on CRT oscilloscope), but it makes no sound at all. Does anybody know the symptom? Is the sound CPU dead?

Can design just about anything you want virtually. I've been trying to develop some control software for my PX-350 which has no editor or control software-but this might work for developing your emulator-I don't have very good sysex "chops" and probably can't help you much but I'll try. Do you know "Marco", the keyboard player? He uses alot of circuit bent stuff and tours and performs regularly using little Casios, a "Speak and Spell" and other old stuff, does very well live. He's on Youtube-i can get you his website or email if you're interested-probably has alot of other stuff i don't even know about. Thanks for posting.

I loved my Korg Poly-61, one of the most advanced keyboards of its time. had one of the first arpeggiators and was very easy to program. Now I know why-thanks XW-Addict for these links. Unbelievable how many patents the Japanese came up with, but then they've been making music instruments for a loooong time and this gives me an even greater appreciation ofr how deep an instrument is the XW.

There are also at least a couple of CZ emulators, and also one for the HT range. I think Casio would do very well to have a keyboard 'emulating' their older synths/ classic boards. I would still love to see a CZ emulator with real time controls, and even better a real time filter function (the hardware CZ's only offered some waveforms that mimicked filter sweeping/ resonance, though with no real time control).

Can design just about anything you want virtually. I've been trying to develop some control software for my PX-350 which has no editor or control software-but this might work for developing your emulator-I don't have very good sysex "chops" and probably can't help you much but I'll try.

My Casio hardware research is in a very early stage. I have downloaded all the early PDFs of keyboard/synth patents and try to understand them. Casio tried to imitate all kinds of acoustic instruments with strings, percussion or wind (e.g. the PT-7 was originally designed to become an electronic mouth organ). Strange is that they released tons of new instruments patents every year until 1996(?), but then it suddenly stopped and only few and in no way revolutionary patents followed from that day on.

I am still employing a PC made from finest DOS hardware made in 1995 to 2002 (running Win98SE/KernelEx with 2 ISA sound cards). So no modern music software nor Windoze programming environment has any chance to run on it. May be that soon I install a 2nd small mainboard for modern Windoze inside the Colani bigtower since web browsers become incompatible with websites and the last remaining antivirus' update and boot duration takes now >20 minutes. The last time I coded something serious is about 10 years ago.

From what I know Casio had to stop thanks to the other well establish brands not because off competitive reason more because of nagging the other brands had on patent issue's at certain synthesize features from all I can remember.

AFAIK it was mainly FM stuff where Casio had patent trouble with Yamaha. But with many other things (like the single-chip softsynth inside SA-series) Casio indeed came first. And they invented a strange concept of using n-stage shift registers (n = count of polyphony channels) instead of flipflops in digital sound generators and an "adder" before the output DAC to implement polyphony by hardware multitasking (switching with main clock speed!) without space eating memory busses inside the chip. In 1st generation instruments they made some really unusual chip designs to permit fully digital synthesis with perhaps 1000 transistors. (Modern PC CPUs have up to 2.5 billions.)

Check the waveform drawings in US patent 4348932 to see what I mean - It did crazy stuff to simulate envelopes without space eating multiplication hardware. And Casio stored and summed increments instead of complete waveforms to avoid 1970th Allen Organ patents.

I believe it was a combination of issues that made Casio leave the pro synth market. The infamous Yamaha patent lawsuit was the main issue, though I'm sure I read that even Yamaha's 'FM' wasn't true FM, but rather 'PM' (Phase Modulation), which is a variation of Casio's PD (Phase Distortion). Furthermore, Casio's iPD on the VZ-1 was closer to true FM than the Yamaha DX series were. However, the VZ-1 didn't sell particularly well. Despite being more powerful than the CZ's, it was more complicated to program to the point many people didn't bother. The factory presets were also somewhat bland and didn't show off the potential of what the VZ was really capable of.

What with the CZ's reaching the end of their shelf life (and the Yamaha lawsuit), the FZ's, though successful were not developed further and the VZ-1 not selling well, I think Casio just baled out. Added to the snobbery from the pro market to anything with 'Casio' written on it, Casio decided to focus on their lucrative and more successful home/ amateur market products, something they've always had a great success with.

Every now and then Casio come out with a great new model and try the waters again, but despite producing great boards the market still doesn't take to them like they do with Rolands/ Korgs/ Yamahas etc. The MZ2000 is a good example of this, and to some extent the XW's, certainly here in the UK, is another.

I am certainly glad that Casio DO still produce such great 'pro' boards, as those of us that who can see their potential are more than grateful to add such excellent instruments to our musical arsenals.

Hi, has someone the rom of the fx-87de x or has a method to extract it from the emulator dll?

I wanted to reverse engineer how the display gets driven by the processor, because there is some questionable stuff in my logic analyzer traces that i wanted to look into

In case anyone wants to solder on a arduino onto a classwiz in order to play around with it, i made some code which relies on the calc to initialize the display and then writes bitmaps to it

_lcd

About the display, setting the corresponding SFR will toggle the contrast/display region/mode/which pixel is on/etc. -- see the emulator source code and there are some supports documentation on the wiki.

On the newer classwiz models (like 991cnx, most gui stuff looks the same) there is a bigger display and they put the lcd controller onto the lcd glass instead of the mcu.

So i tought about looking at the code that drives it because it looks like they just use the gpio.

Are you sure that the sfr gets used for the newer models? because i don't think that they put hardware into the mcu to drive the never displays but i can be mistaken with my toughts.

The lcd documentation in the wiki can be updated once i have reverse engineered it more.

The emulator for the new Classpad II fx-cp400 is now available from this link. Enjoy!!!The ClassPad II should be out soon. When I attended the NCTM in Denver last April, the Casio technician demonstrating the unit said that the release date is July 2013. The emulator will give you an idea of what the machine does and how it works. The emulator works for 90 days. I read a claim on the web that the emulator can be made more permanent if you connect a physical Classpad II to the host PC.NamirEdited: 7 July 2013, 9:47 a.m. [ Return to Index Top of Index ]

People have found ways to run these ancient platforms either through MAME or MESS either through RetroArch or standalone and still launched through LaunchBox. MAME confuses me more every day as each platform I've dealt with requires at least a slightly different setup. Maybe there's something about MAME I'm not getting.

Anyway, I'm just looking to figure out how to configure the Casio Loopy, RCA Studio II, and if anyone has tips on the future platforms I'll be working with just to avoid headaches I would greatly appreciate it. I'm listing the old platforms I've successfully got working so you see I've gotten somewhere. I'm not trying to throw a bunch of platforms to help me with individually. I'm hoping they all have something in common with MAME and learning that would make it easier to run older platforms on it.

I've read a little bit about MESS but most of what I've read is years old and I understand that MESS got absorbed into MAME so I don't know if MESS is recommended anymore. Maybe the current MAME build can handle everything now.

If you have the bios rom for the RCA, studio2.zip, and the correct Software List roms, current MAME should be able to run the roms. Most roms start with corrupted graphics, so hit F3 to clear the screen, then Q to start the game.

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