Dremeling and ripping out the brain of a 25-year old vintage machine – I was so Frankenstein yesterday. Luckily, it worked, being the first step to a much improved Oberheim Matrix-1000 running with – at least – doubled system clock, and patched firmware. This takes up the work of Gligli who was the first to hack a faster CPU into the Matrix, and tries to take it one step further.
Hacking a vintage instrument – my favourite guitar player calls this cruelty. Yet there are good reasons to do it: As I’ve mentioned before, the Matrix‘ CPU is actually too slow for what it tries to achieve, but the 8-bit 6809 chip could only be clocked to 2 MHz in its fastest version, and this is it.
So Gligli, a hacker from France known for his Prophet-600 firmware rewrite/retrofit, had the idea of using a 6309 CPU, a chip from the same era that, while maintaining drop-in compatibitily, offered faster instructions and could be overclocked to 4 MHz. So he replaced the CPU and the main oscillator, patched the firmware and – it worked.
Yet there are some issues with Gligli’s solution, in my humble opinion. The Matrix‘ peripheral chips are designed to work at 2 MHz; by doubling the CPU clock, they have only half the time to read or write data to the bus. Not all of the hardware is up to this; Gligli’s solution is simply writing everything twice, and that seems to work, but it’s not very trustworthy.
So I’m planning to install a CPU with a custom clock generator that is using asymmetrical cycles to give the peripherals more time to read and write. (I’ll have to build in new oscillator circuitry anyway, as I happened to buy 63C09E CPUs, which rely on external clock generation.) And there’s always the possibility to go even further and replace the CPU by a modern programmable logic chip, an FPGA, that can be loaded with a 6809-compatible core clocked even higher and has proper slowing-down logic to interface the old hardware. More on that later, suffice it to say that I simply want my Matrix’s CPU in a socket. And be it only to be able to revert to the original chip.