zynthian-sys VS circle

There's a bunch of people doing some pretty amazing synth builds with the Raspberry Pi -- the Zynthian crew [0] springs to mind.

Basically bring your own USB midi keyboard / controller - these tend to be cheap, but also engender very strong opinions, so there's some distinct advantages to having them as separate components, but with the synth box being much more portable than a laptop or desktop.

As to the Korg Wavestate - on this side of the pond (AU) it has an RRP of A$1500, though street pricing is around A$1000.

[0] https://zynthian.org/

Another option might be to get a Raspberry Pi and a USB audio interface to run Zynthian. Zynthian can be built from scratch with a TV, mouse and keyboard. You will need the USB audio for a line input from your amp. Heaps of DIY learning building your own Zynthian. You can scale up to the full hardware kit if you like what you see.

I suggest something Raspberry Pi based, Zynthian for example. It's the total opposite in this regard, allowing so much freedom and possibilities that it can get overwhelming.

There are several great RPi synth projects around, including mt32-pi, mini-dexed and samplerbox, but they're all intended for headless use (or with a tiny embedded display). The outlier in that respect AFAIK is Zynthian: https://zynthian.org/

Exactly opposite situation in my case - my Ubuntu Studio rig has been rock solid for tracking and many projects .. but the good news is that even if, for whatever reason, you can't qite grok things to be as productive as a pro Ubuntu Studio user (hint: you can) we have all the good things happening in ZynthianOS to explore, anyway - and this just wraps up the same essential goodies into a hardware device that is push-button-user friendly:

http://zynthian.org

And of course there are bleeding edge lessons learned, applied in things like monome, etc.

Zynthian is a good option but a bit hard to get your hands on in the silicon supply chain crisis.

Zynthian is a good one to add to this list.

You might get some more traction by integrating a Raspberry Pi in a eurorack adapter (or RPi Pico) with some sort of CV interface and leveraging an open source project like Zynthian.

If you're a developer and feeling adventurous, you can also try building it yourself. The source is all on GitHub. It uses the circle-stdlib project (which is circle plus some additions to support much of the C and C++ standard libraries) as a submodule; hopefully I've set that up correctly, but you could always clone that separately and place it in the MiniScript-Pi folder. Check out circle's build instructions for info on setting up your toolchain. (Mac users: be careful with the configure script, which does not work properly on MacOS; find me on Discord and I'll help you fix the script or configure manually.)

I suggest checking out circle https://github.com/rsta2/circle since it's basically a library for the pi hardware. I'm doing some experiments with it myself now.

You can also run a Pi without an operating system, programming it in C or C++ probably. See for example: GitHub - rsta2/circle: A C++ bare metal environment for Raspberry Pi with USB (32 and 64 bit)

BMC64 is VICE in a trenchcoat unikernel / bare-metal framework called Circle: https://github.com/rsta2/circle

It uses the circle library (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) to provide a minimal runtime (mainly to interface with the hardware).

I experimented with circle the other day (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) Looks promising, and most likely within your knowledge of C/C++ development.

Natively would be amazing but a vast amount of work.

The way Apple moved classic MacOS from 680x0 to PowerPC was to write a tiny kernel emulator, with an API to run native stuff on the metal, and run more or less the whole OS under emulation, profile it and just translate the most speed-critical bits.

That's a lot of work for a FOSS project but given the performance delta between 1980s 680x0 and 2020s ARM, total emulation of the whole thing should be perfectly fine. It's how the PiStorm Amiga upgrade works.

https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

So all I envision is something like Aranym:

https://aranym.github.io/

... running on top of Ultibo, say:

https://ultibo.org/

Or maybe Circle:

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

Circle is a C++ bare metal programming environment for the Raspberry Pi.

The only other reasonable option would be to port it to a new platform which is popular that has a few well documented hardware interfaces so as not to create a hellish nightmare writing drivers. Maybe then you could do a one-off port to that platform (though you might have to re-target the HolyC compiler to target it instead if it is not x86_64). The Raspberry PI seems like a decent option here since there is already a baremetal C++ library supporting USB, keyboard, mouse, sound, video, and as an added bonus UART, I2C, SPI, GPIO. You would have good code examples for porting all the necessary drivers. But obviously this would still be a lot of work and the compiler would need to be re-targeted and user space adapted for running on ARM. That being said backwards compatibility is strong, ARM seems actually interested in keeping it that way (at least for now). The library I'm talking about is here: https://github.com/rsta2/circle