The Buchla 700 Emulation Project

We are a non-commercial open source project that develops a hardware emulator for the Buchla 700 on Linux, OS X, and Windows. The idea is to build something that runs the original Buchla 700 firmware, i.e., the BIOS and the MIDAS VII GUI-based instrument definition and sequencing software. The firmware source code was made available to the public a few years ago by Lynx Crowe, its creator, via Aaron Lanterman at Georgia Tech (​http://lanterman.ece.gatech.edu/buchla700/).

Note that Lynx released the firmware for non-commercial personal and educational use only and as-is with no guarantees of completeness or correctness. While we place our modifications to the firmware in the public domain, you still need to respect Lynx's licensing terms for the underlying original firmware.

We got the firmware to build with a modern-day GCC-based cross-toolchain for the Motorola 68k, and we started to build a minimalistic emulator that mimics the Buchla 700 hardware just enough to allow the firmware to function properly.

At this point, the firmware works pretty well when run in the emulator. However, we do not yet generate any sound. The code that drives the Buchla 700's digital sound generator - the FPU - is not part of the released source code. Now that we have the user interface up and running, our next job will be to reconstruct the FPU.

Installing and using the emulator

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Getting the source code

We have two Git repositories. buchla-68k.git is our modified version of the original firmware. See https://bob.lopatic.de/trac/browser/buchla-68k/readme.txt for details. Here's how to access it:

• git clone https://bob.lopatic.de/buchla-68k.git (user open, password sesame, read-only access)

• https://bob.lopatic.de/gitweb/?p=buchla-68k.git (Gitweb browser)
• https://bob.lopatic.de/trac/browser/buchla-68k (Trac browser)

Then there is buchla-emu.git, which is our emulator. See https://bob.lopatic.de/trac/browser/buchla-emu/readme.txt for details. Here's how to access it:

• git clone https://bob.lopatic.de/buchla-emu.git (user open, password sesame, read-only access)

• https://bob.lopatic.de/gitweb/?p=buchla-emu.git (Gitweb browser)
• https://bob.lopatic.de/trac/browser/buchla-emu (Trac browser)

If you would like to work with us, we'll be happy to give you write access to the repositories via SSH.