New feature summary | Europa User Guide |
What is not included
We have not included some features that would be expected in an upgrade like Europa. This section documents the reasons for not including these desirable features. We would like these features ourselves, but adding them would have extended the development time, increased cost, and increased the complexity of the upgrade - all beyond the project’s goals. In the future, Synthcom Systems may provide such an upgrade, but one is not available at the time of this writing.
The LFO 2 and pitch bend controls are direct wirings from the bender board to the voice boards. The controller board has no control over the bender board, which means Europa has no control over it. This modification would require additional hardware.
MIDI Syncable LFOs
MIDI Syncable LFOs is a feature that everyone would like to have. The voice board LFOs are software generated, and their rates are preprogrammed in the voice board code. The controller board has no way of telling the voice boards to retrigger the LFO or setting the rate to a granular enough level to make syncable LFOs possible. However, most sequencer packages provide continuous controller based LFOs, so the behavior of a MIDI syncable LFO can be simulated by the sequencer via MIDI CC messages.
Tape operation
Tape support was not included for hopefully obvious reasons. Once you have the ability to save and restore patches via MIDI, what use is the tape interface? If you have old patches lying around on cassettes, you can still boot the Roland code and retrieve your patches, reboot to Europa, and save them via MIDI.
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