FAQ

Hasn't this been done before?

Yes, DX7 emulation has been achieved to very good levels of quality by several different closed and open source projects. Most notably the dexed project. Some of those projects have involved running the emulation on the RaspberryPi Pico and other similar MCUs.

Does this project use the Dexed/MSFA engine?

No, a new DX7 simulation has been written for this project based on information from various online sources. However, in the absence of access to a real DX7, the MSFA (Music Synthesizer For Android) embedded in Dexed has been used as an audio reference.

Does the project use or depend on code from third party projects?

For the RPi Pico target, no not directly. All source built into the picoX7.uf2 image is either in this repo or from the Platform repo. NOTE: The RPi Pico has a small boot ROM which always runs after a reset.

The native test target depends on SDL2.

Why target the Raspberry Pi Pico when more powerful MCU modules are available?

When there are more than enough resources available the challenge is gone and the reward on success greatly reduced.

Can this project be built on Windows?

Almost certainly. All project software dependencies are available on Windows and the build tool cmake supports Windows. However, all development of this project to date has been via the UNIX command line on MacOS and Linux. So there are likely to be some small issues that will need to be solved for a successful Windows build.

Why doesn't this project use the Raspberry Pi Pico C++ SDK?

The author of this project has been maintaining a portable C++ SDK for a range of MCUs and other platforms for many years Platform. This has been fun, instructive, rewarding and enabled rapid porting of projects between different target platforms and avoided having to repeatedly learn different build systems and APIs.