<< Flora & Airto @ Yoshi's

2002 > August

A Cocoa convert >>

Friday, 30 August 2002

Studio 5 on OS X ::

I basically kissed my Studio 5 goodbye, with a tear in my eye, when I left Opcode 3 years ago because I knew I’d be asked about this repeatedly now ...

All hardware needs new drivers for OS X. Including the Studio 5.

We made a design decision in 1990 to put as much of the fancy software that tells the Studio 5 what to do on the Mac so that we wouldn’t be constrained by the user interface of a tiny LCD front panel ... and so the tricky software could be debugged by one of its designers on a desktop computer instead of on a 68000 emulator.

Now Gibson holds the source code for all of that software. It’s complex. It’s not going to get ported to OS X. My recommendation for those who love their Studio 5's would be to try this: keep an old Mac running a pre-X OS. (You could probably buy a sufficiently powerful old Mac for under $100; I’m thinking a 68030 running System 7.0 or better. The old PowerBook Duo 210 I have buried in a closet somewhere would do). Connect it to the Studio 5's Port A and use it to edit the Studio 5. Create an emulation mapping for a standard interface or MIDI Time Piece. Connect a Mac running OS X to the Studio 5's Port B. And (ouch) wait a few months until someone gets around to making a MIDI Time Piece serial driver for OS X.

Hardware developers: if you create a Firewire or timestamping USB MIDI interface that does what <CoreMIDI/MIDIThruConnection.h> does (it’s new in 10.2), I will sing its praises to the world.

References:
Studio 5 on OS X (16 December 2004)

<< Flora & Airto @ Yoshi's

2002 > August

A Cocoa convert >>

---

---