Joakim Eriksson has introduced fm1-dock, a new firmware for the M-VAVE FM-1 that lets you load the hardware synth with four synth engines and swap them on the fly.
Ericksson also shared this preview video, which demonstrates the firmware on a real FM-1 and in the emulator, running the following instruments:
- FM-1 SID: C64 tunes on a cycle-exact 6510 and reSID (Arkanoid, Wizball, Commando)
- OberVave by zvenson: a 4-track analog poly
- CS-1 by twochannels: a CS-80-style synth
- Scintilla: the 1981 Elka Synthex, ending on its laser harp (“Ring mod.”)
Ericksson say that you can write your own module and deploy it over USB in seconds.
fm1-dock also enables BLE-MIDI support.
Availability:
fm1-dock is available now as open firmware on Github.
Wow, that was quick! This was one of the bigger roadblocks to freely using an FM-1. Setting aside the chance of bricking your device is the biggest gain so far. Everything else is just fine-tuning the workspace to suit your own doings.
Exciting. So we’re moving towards having an kind of ‘operating system’ firmware that you load once and update rarely, which manages the more dynamic firmwares or can even swap between them.
Since it does bluetooth I wonder if we could even push fw updates over bluetooth wirelessly.