While I'm very *pro* keeping this thing in original form... I haven't really found much use for it. (Mostly, maybe, due to so many project-ideas, and "real life," whatever that is).

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Weird idea... first some background...

This interesting article came up about an electronics-related archaeological endeavor...

https://hackaday.com/2024/10/14/solving-a-retrocomputing-mystery-with-an-album-cover-greengate-ds3/#more-727779

(and Part 2: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/14/the-greengate-ds3-part-2-putting-a-retro-sampler-to-use/ )

...

Following Adam Fabio's rendition of the story, I was running through the ideas of what the mystery-chip could be, but didn't quite get there on my own... OF Course! A DMA controller! How else would a system of that vintage keep up with the timing demands of sampled audio?

Which led me to the observation that... Heh, that was one of the big-learns from my [our] archaeological endeavor with this system, the Omni4... DMA controllers running the bus and RAM far faster than the Z80 CPU could... at a time when, frankly, it was darn-near shocking to look back on and believe such speeds were possible. 20MSPS!

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For a brief moment I considered the possibility the Omni4's logic-analyzer add-on card (being an otherwise stock Kaypro machine) might just be capable of doing for the Kaypro what the card in the article did for the AppleII... Heh!

This is my brain, and why I have so many project-ideas and actually get to doing so comparatively-few.

I'm no musician, anyhow... But I know a thing or two (built most my career around) MIDI, so I suppose adding a keyboard would be a snap in comparison to writing the software...

Heh. The original software-architect for the AppleII product was, apparently, pleased to be approached about his long-forgotten masterpiece... Heartwarming.

Wonder if he'd cough-up sourcecode. Heh! 

6502 assembly, maybe? What a friggin ridiculous undertaking this would be... especially for a long-forgotten, if ever even recognized, board that only seems to exist in two machines in the world, OTOH... OTOH...

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The "Heartwarming" aspect of this article is really what gets me. There's no particular reason to go down a path like they did. Nearly any keyboard can be connected to nearly any computer these days, and loaded-up with one of probably dozens of softwares to acheive the same as this setup, and probably far more.

OTOH, these folk found the time and cause to remember some other folks' long-forgotten hard work... And part of my early draw to electronics and software is its duplicatability, specifically in the interest of its longevity. 

Some folk got together long ago and created their "baby"... It wasn't the best of the best, by any means. Sure, the Fairlight won that competition hands-down. But, here, these folk, complete strangers to the originators, have gone out of their way to make sure that forgotten baby has offspring... Beautiful tale.

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I have no idea how that fits with the Kaypro/Omni4 idea, except in that plausibly it wouldn't be difficult to reproduce that card, similarly. But, well, 20MSPS logic analyzers sized to fit 5.25in floppies aren't particularly desireable nor useful, even to the hardcorest test-equipment collectors... But maybe it's just a matter of software and a tiny add-on (for output) to turn it into something more... an alternate timeline where Kaypros were competitive with AppleII's competitiveness with the Fairlight. Heh!

But, see, it could be more than that... Card-interfaces back then were quite simple... Really not much more than tapping off the CPUs' memory-bus... So, I mean... It wouldn't be implausible to use either of these cards in *any* 8-bitter system (even, say, an AVR)... with some software-generalizing and new plug-ins...

OK, yeah, a bit carried-away. But, not implausible. And, for an hour or so, there, I was pretty excited about the possibilities. Enough to start writing about it, anyhow... with two friggin' thumbs. Heh!