ANY CODERS IN HERE??? HELP TAKE MATTERS INTO OUR OWN HANDS!

punchdrunk wrote:henri sizaret: what you are saying is on point for the most part. i'm completely aware of the marketing/pimping principles behind akai's moves. its basic business that makes sense for them (not us).

i'm just still heated about them taking out moving events in step edit. that is just the most ridiculous example of them dumbing down the machine.
and i dont really feel like that it is some advanced extra feature.

they don't want to implement timestretch or zoning, then fine. i can get around this with my computer and some programs. those are "extra" features for higher models.

but moving stuff in step edit is not advanced or extra. i'm sick of cutting and pasting all day to clean up my sequences. thats what makes me heated. this is just some basic **** that they aren't going to add to an os because they want to sell their other ****.

i don't need a huge expensive mpc4000 and i dont want to deal with the 2000xl's zip scsi headache and slower load up times.

so overall this is where i am at now. frustrated....!

I'd really like to see this implemented so you don't have to cut and paste. When I bought the MPC 1k, I knew it wouldn't be as fully featured (no timestretch, reverse, zoning, etc.), but I really thought this should be included there.. not some lame work around.

sumedho wrote:Not being negative but it would be pretty hard to do. First you need to know what kind of processor they are using. Then you need their development tools. Without these its going to be real tough. If the processor is specially developed for akai then they would have their own in-house tools for development which means you can basically forget it! (real expensive)

What they should do is release the development tools and OS as open source and let people go to town on it. Then we would get some pretty cool things happening. But that's not going to happen any time soon.

Best solution is to hassle akai and make your own PC programs that work with the mpc. Kind of sux but what can you do?

Good point.

I took a shot of the CPU , it's on my "inside" web page, and I found a link to a page on it: http://www.renesas.com/fmwk.jsp?cnt=sh7 ... 727_group/

That has a "software and tools" page, with links to some downloadables, including a compiler/simulator/debugger at http://download.renesas.com/eng/mpumcu/ ... index.html

Nice one.

The development tools aren't free though...probably pretty expensive (the usually are) cause of small market and sales. Probably looking at thousands, maybe?

Then akai has to release the source code which aint gonna happen.

Its a real shame though cause something like that could really push akai and the mpc along. They should take notice cause hardware is really getting challenged by software and computers these days.

It would be highly unlikely for Akai to release any information whatsoever on the MPC. They would not hand out information for the same reasons they leave features out of the MPC. Also Akai have to worry about their brand name. If a new OS was created, it would probably be unstable. Then stories would pop up all over the place describing how Akai's MPC 1000 is an unstable instrument. It wouldn't make a difference if the cause of the instability was Akai's official OS or not. Think of the questions newbies ask on this forum - not much research goes into many peoples' posts.

A third reason Akai would never release any information on how the MPC works is their competitors. Any information Akai's competitors have about the internals of Akai's instruments will greatly help the competitors and greatly hurt Akai.

Yet another reason Akai would not want to support such a project is that they make no money from second hand sales. If new OSs for the old hardware are released that patch the old hardware up to the abilities of Akai's new hardware, people will buy the old hardware second hand, stealing sales away from Akai.

Then there is also the issue with the time needed to fulfill this project's goals. It would most likely be cheaper for the people involved to buy an instrument that meets their requirements out of the box than spend hours poking around at binaries.

With all that said, I still wouldn't mind seeing what people come up with when or if they do... I'm definitely not holding my breath.

Like I said, the tools can be free. Just build a cross-compile version of GCC for the SH-3 (see http://gcc.gnu.org for details). Full support for that chip, including the DSP extensions it has. The SuperH processors are one of THE most popular embedded processors out there. It is not Akai specific, and there are plenty of free software tools for it.

so, to cut the story short :

we all would like to see (free) improved OS (new xtra features),
but we agree it is unlikely to happen from Akai (no business logic), and we think no one out there would do it (too hard/costly + intellectual property issues).

What's next?

(hey, I like this thread, it's getting really funky !!!!)

well, the non-programmers can do beta testing, donkeywork (i dont know downloads maybe), or send postcards

just trying to keep this thread fresh.

i thought the whole purpose of the MPC 1k was for those who wanted something to use in conjunction with faster sample editing software on a computer, hence no timestretch or any of that?.....as for the step edit thing, i've been using the mpc 2kxl step edit for awhile now and it hasnt bothered me.........and besides, the mpc file system isnt much of a headache as some would have you believe(usually the hardheaded ones)....i've got to toy with the 1k recently and it was okay, but if I had to choose with no prior knowledge or use of both machines, i'd go for the 2kxl coupled with a pretty decent laptop for sample editing and whatnot...........

It's not like there aren't people out there willing to do hardware hacks. If you aren't familiar with the scene, google "x box hacks" or something, and you'll see TONS of people all over that kind of stuff. We just have to get the right people excited...in other words, I don't know how to hack stuff either, but I know it is probably very possible.

As for stability, I don't know. The Xbox hacks I've heard about do things like enabling Linux to be installed, games to be backed up, etc. As in totally different functionality, not improvements/reworkings of the original functions, which is what most people here would be interested in. Sure, it would be funny to run Linux on an MPC, but, uh...why? I don't know how hard it would be for someone to build a new mpc os from scratch, without having to original to go by. I tend to think it would be difficult to get the Akai code to work off of...or would it?

Anyhow, I defer to those with greater knowledge on this. I just wanted to chime in and express my opinion that it wouldn't be impossible to make mods to the mpc1k, with the right skillz.

These are OUR boxes after all right? We should Ownz0red them....

hey, Swissmaster Cheese, your picture ROCKS !!!!

Rough'nReady wrote:It's not like there aren't people out there willing to do hardware hacks. If you aren't familiar with the scene, google "x box hacks" or something, and you'll see TONS of people all over that kind of stuff. We just have to get the right people excited...in other words, I don't know how to hack stuff either, but I know it is probably very possible.

well.. the xbox stuff is a little different - it's very basically a pc in a console box, and the dev tools are available as are devkits. it's a damn site easier to hack something when you can connect it to your pc and debug it. hacking an mpc would have to be done blind to a greater degree, certainly for the first few steps at least.

i think that writing an entirely new os from scratch without support from akai would be incredibly difficult - and i see absolutely no reason why they would help us - but at the very least we could probably do some customisation of the os.

btw.. yes i am a coder... and yes the first thing i did when.. no.. before i got my mpc was to take a look at the os file ;) if you do that, you'll see:
a) a bunch of empty space ( mmmm...... space for patches! ;)
and
b) a load of ascii. has anyone tried anything as simple as changing this and seeing if it works?

one word worth mentioning here is 'checksum'. if i was akai, or anyone else for that matter, i'd put a checksum in there somewhere - not necessarily to stop people changing the thing but so that i could do an integrity check on any os updates. now if they've done this then we might not be able to get anywhere at all.

there are plenty more issues, but enough rambling from me already. maybe i should go home and quickly try changing some text to see how far i get! fixing bugs? adding features? let's try and walk first.. :)


paul...

you're a good man evilpaul...

There are some interesting strings in there:

Offset -> String
0x06F824 -> AHardDisk
0x0749E4, 0x074AD3, 0x074B0C -> HARD DISK

I'd like to hear the results of changing a string in the OS too...

ok.. well after a bit of a play i've made very little progress ;D changing even a single bit of a the text gets you the message "A correct OS file wasn't found." when you try and flash it so there's some checksumming going on in there. we can still discover some useful information though...

it looks like the first 64k of the bin file is the boot loader code, followed by a 48byte header with name, version number, file length.. that sorta thing.. then the main binary itself. so.. there's some trivial info to go on there.. not much but it's a start.

this could certainly be a fun project.. though i seriously doubt that anything particularly useful will come out of it. not trying to be negative.. but the mpc is a big thing to be stumbling around inside. don't expect results any time soon.. in fact.. just don't expect results ;D

jksuperstar: as you say, i think the next step is to grab the sh3/gcc stuff and start poking around with that.


paul...