CYBERYOGI =CO=Windler

If I remember well, ICs (unless based on ROM software) were not even copyrighted but only patented, and patents last maximum 20 years. A fully digital chip shouldn't be too hard to simulate on modern FPGA. Only analogue ICs (like Curtis VCF filters) do complex nonlinear things those have no obvious straight forward way to replicate in binary logics schematics or software. In Casio phase distortion everything before the DAC is digital and hence can be implemented on FPGA.

I generall try hard to keep room humidity above 50%, because else my hand knuckle skin becomes very sore and keeps bleeding. My Amiga computer workstation is built into a DIY wood and chrome case (had been a Wega loudspeaker box, Amiga 500 PCB, DIY external keyboard with aluminium bottom, constructed around 1990) with quite a cable mess inside. I run this machine daily for my diary etc. despite it has various quirks. So it tends to crash by static electricity when touching the aluminium front panel (diskette drives) in winter, which has somewhat drilled me to touch the radiator first anyway. (This Amiga also crashes e.g. when I power on my cassette deck (Telefunken TC650) at the same power strip, so it would likely not survive a nuke attack.) Due to there is a mobile radio mast directly in front of my bedroom window, my bed corner got a special shielding (overleaping horizontal aluminized wallpaper stripes interconnected with capacitors and neon lamps) and the rug area under the bed has an earthed metal mesh underneath, connected to the radiator pipe (NOT socket ground). If you insist wearing an ESD wrist strap (IMO an as bad habit as drinking chlorine bleach solution to sanitize your own guts) it may help to put additionally to the 1M resistor a small inductor (coil) in series into the cable to reduce HF dirt from socket ground. When working inside a device with shielded metal case connected to GND line of its PCB, simply touch the metal case to equalize potential with its PCB to prevent ESD. When the device is powered off and plugged out, you may also connect the wrist strap (crocodile clip) only to that case frame to stay at same potential like the PCB without hooking your nervous system for hours to socket ground.

AFAIK only the power to the synth never must be turned off (also keep full batteries inside) during update process because it completely erases its entire flash memory and then only stays alive by the code it still has in its ram. The computer or midi cable may be disconnected, rebooted, replaced with another or even updating the entire Windows version of the PC in between without doing harm. Only the power to the synth NEVER must become disconnected. It's like in the robot movie "Short Circuit".

a car battery is DC - one pole wouldn't hurt. The problem is high frequency dirt on the mains line. (To make it clear, the ground current through an 1 megohm resistor at the strap can not kill you when touching live mains parts.)

You don't need to replace the whole cable (I wouldn't do either). Simply poke out the broken lead ends with a nail scissor and solder a piece of wire across them. Isolate them with transparent household adhesive film to avoid further trouble. (Professional insulating tape is worse, because it consists of PVC and the plasticizer in it tends to turn its own glue layer into honey within few years and so makes the tape fall off.)

Outch! - a perforated ribbon cable? Who screwed up that screw?! I often found that in trash/toy grade tablehooters like Angeltone or Yongmei, but not in a Casio.

It is important to regard that an IC that once has been overloaded by short circuits, wrong voltages or static electricity can still starve many days or months later even when it seems to have survived without damage. This is caused by small internal short circuits on the silicon die, those can come into being by the "lightning strikes" of static electricity or local overheating from too high currents. These so-called "hot spots" make the chip draw more current and make its silicon locally overheat again. The local overheat softens the different layers of the chip and thus makes them slowly melt together (electro- migration) , which enlarges the heat producing short circuit area. But do not become too hysteric about static electricity. Particularly the warning never to place a mainboard on carpet is absurd nonsense because it contradicts physics. (To prevent furniture scratches, I even rarely place PCBs on uncarpeted surfaces.) This false urban legend obviously originated from the fact that scuffing shoes on synthetic carpet can produce static electricity, so someone formed the idiot equation "carpet = evil". But damage can only happen where a large conductive object (i.e. your body) insulated from ground (through your shoe soles) gets charged with highvoltage against environment and then rapidly discharges by making a current pulse flow across IC pins to ground. I.e. an ungrounded IC (e.g. PCB disconnected from anything) gets unlikely damaged at all because no current can flow anywhere. When only the PCB rests on carpet, it lacks that large charged conductive object; accidentally rubbing the PCB itself such strongly against carpet that friction produces a potential difference with enough current to cause harm is next to impossible, because metal traces on the PCB are conductive enough to short that voltage before it builds up high enough, and the spiky pins prevent slipping (hence no friction), and particularly there is nothing to store such a charge, which keeps currents too low. (The installed capacitors act like a shortcircuit to such very short HV spikes.) Your body (large conductive object) is the problem; it does not matter whether it got charged by a carpet (shoe friction) or anything else (e.g. synthetic, silk or wool clothing rubbing on a seat with insulating upholstery or plastic). Also the airflow by cleaning with a household vacuum cleaner in real life does not damage ICs by static electricity; only avoid to touch with the metal nozzle or pipe (a charged conductive object) and reduce suction if possible. Shipping a PCB inside a too large generic plastic bags might be a greater risk, because rapid sliding around during transport (e.g. RAM modules have not spiky side to stop this) may damage chips. Therefore antistatic packaging exists; if you have none, you may wrap in aluminium foil, but do not use this for anything containing batteries (e.g. PC mainboard) to avoid shortcircuit. Most sensitive against static discharge are old CMOS ICs (e.g. early button cell operated things); modern ICs are better protected by internal diodes. I generally never use a grounded wrist strap - not because of awkwardness, but it invites the reaper! And not only while working in mains operated devices, grounding oneself means calling for death. That is to say, the ground line of the mains grid is infested with all kinds of EMF crap; so hooking up your nervous system directly to this pulsed high frequency dirt for hours during work is an absolutely terrible idea. I doubt that the 1M serial resistor can filter much of this, so unless you have a water pipe without connections to mains (e.g. bare wire flow heaters spoil it), an average room has no safe place to attach an ESD strap. Instead quickly grasp something grounded (e.g. radiator, water tap, socket ground prong or grounded metal case) after walking around before you touch ICs. To me, simply wearing no shoes and sitting on floor in cotton-based jeans during work turned out to be fully sufficient to prevent jolts and chip crashes by static shocks (hence no risk of damage). In real life most chip damage during DIY is caused by other unremembered incidents (wrong polarity, wrong current flow by disconnected GND, misplugging) and falsely accusing static discharge. When the rest is done properly (no insulating clothing or shoes), an antistatic wrist strap is almost a placebo to calm the mind of repair companies and insurances, and knowing the health risks it should be better avoided.

If I remember well, such incomplete midi cables already existed for the joystick port of early FM sound cards, so the problem is not new. I don't know if actual hardware damage by poorly made midi cables have happened, or if they only cause mains hum and data mess. But if floating voltage through an optoisolator is part of the midi specification and an old instrument depends on this, theoretically all kinds of nasty things may result when plugging low resistance outputs at different DC levels together those were never designed for such use. Regarding EMF and shielding of PC cases, I am quite shocked to see how many "gamer" PCs come with transparent acryl sides and plenty of unshielded plastic sections (some people even operate it open), those in 1980th for shure would have quickly sent the manufacturers into prison for causing RFI, since it was considered the most important main purpose of a computer case to block interferences. E.g. the Atari 400 homecomputer and first generation VCS2600 console even contained a thick and heavy cast metal shielding around its PCB. In the age of wifi nobody really seems to care about building TEMPEST grade shielded cases anymore, but in the opposite they want to make big holes everywhere for easily placing antennas behind. (Also my Dreambox DM8000 came with unshielded case holes like barn gates.) 1980th electronics was never designed to cooperate with this plague, so it can cause noisy sound and distorted video. I have upgraded my Highscreen Colani bigtower with perforated sheetmetal and metal flyscreen inserts and additionally added plenty of ferrite cores around cables to reduce interferences on my analogue CRT TV. All my computers have been castrated (wifi and bluetooth cards removed) to defeat brain destroying pulsed microwave radiation.

Omitting an optoisolator may even toast your keyboard or PC if everything is poorly designed. Imagine e.g. the keyboard has its midi ground on +12V but audio ground on 0V (with bridged power amp it might even be -15V or such). Now plug such a midi cable into PC (connecting that +12V to PC GND) and the keyboard audio out to the PC audio in (connecting keyboard 0V to the same PC GND) and kaboom! At least without protective resistor inside the midi cable it may make everything go up in soot.

I got on eBay the guts of 4 dead Casio CT-420, including 4x 49 keys those look at least pretty similar like those for CZ-1000/3000/5000 on that BustedGear website. With boxes full of damaged electronic spare parts it is hard to estimate if I was sitting on a gold- or rather a land mine (lithium rechargeables tend to be the latter). But those keys (may be 2 or 3kg of them) look blatantly like they might be the same. They came attached to a punched sheetmetal rail with springs on their back, forming each a 49 keys assembly (without PCB mount, which was likely part of the plastic case, full of decomposed foam rubber residues). I dismantled them to save space.

If your sausage fingers can not play an MT-540, search for a Casio CT-660, which is the same with 61 fullsize keys and more buttons. A 49 fullsize version is CT-440/CT-460, or if you want it as a keyless midi sound module, there is Casio CSM-1 (aka Hohner MSE-1) that can be combined with any midi master keyboard.

Damaged Casio LCD foil cables can not be repaired - not even the glue can be remelted by heat. Only when it simply fell off (no cracks inside the carbon layer) it may be pressed on by constructing a clamp mechanism with adhesive foam rubber strip holding it down. But damage by battery leak vapour will surely make it unusable. The Casio foil cable disease also affects the VL-1, many calculators, alarm clocks and LCD games, so a systematic fix is urgently needed. I hope that eventually someone will find out how to refill an inkjet printer cartridge with matching conductive paint and various glues to print a remade cable on plastic foil. Physically this shouldn't be that difficult. See e.g. this one. Print Conductive Circuits With an Inkjet Printer: https://www.instructables.com/id/Print-Conductive-Circuits-With-An-Inkjet-Printer/

I just discovered that I still do have the decoded Casio MT-750 rom ("mt750remapped.zip" = 1632KB, original rom "Casio MT-750_Panasonic MN238000CUB,85050 (27C800).BIN" = 1024KB). I only didn't find it because it was not named Casio.

Casio CZ-230S is another preset keyboard with 4 externally reprogrammable patches. May the data format be identical with CT-6500? I own no "tablet" (pulsed microwaves are brain destroying) beside my castrated IBM Thinkpad X61t (wifi/bluetooth card chucked), which resistive touchscreen is single-touch and crashes various Win10-only apps (e.g. "Photos"). I am also no registered member of the M$ club and hence have no access to their app store anyway.

The Casio MT-240 sound engine is a real subset of MT-540 (which has more rom), so search for MT-540 sounds. The PCM engine consists not only of samples but is a seriously complex softsynth using program loop synthesis (individually programmed algorithmic sounds with wicked modulations) and several FM variants. I dumped the roms of these and recently got 3 sets of scrap PCBs of Casio CT-420, which is likely MT-240 with different demo and no midi port. Somewhen I will dump that rom and examine how much they differ (may be only the sequencer data of the demo).

Another variant of the SA-46 knockoff is named SANMERSEN YCY-0878 (box brand SANMERSEN, seen on eBay). It is labelled with only each 100 Tones and Rhythms (not 128) and has a real LCD (backlit 3 digit dot matrix, bezel has only note icons, no label "Liquid Erystal Shower"). The button names differ from HL-70. Pink, black and blue versions were made (depicted on box). It has 10 demos. The names on photo are barely readable and so may be a wild guess. 00 For Elise 01 Music Box Dancer 02 The Farmer in the Dell (?) 03 Little White Boat (?) 04 Happy Birthday 05 Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 06 Mozart Piano Sonata 07 Chopin Nocturne 08 The Maiden's Prayer (?) 09 Dancing (?) The buttons are: EFFECT, TONE SEL RECORD, PLAY, PROGRAM, START/STOP [the big button], "Combinational Key" (?) [= numpad] ME TRONOME, DRUM KITS, VOLUME, TEMPO, TRAN SPOSE, DEMO ONE, DEMO ALL, TONE, RHYTHM I don't own this version but only saw it on eBay. Interesting is that the panel button contacts on my HL-70 PCB are printed with even different names (e.g. CHORD, SYNC, SOUND, RHYTHM | MODE, TONE | RECORD, PROG), which hints that a 3rd version with yet another different CPU (likely including chord/accompaniment) exists.

Sorry, the only keyboard groups I was member of were about Casio. And I did not export in any proprietary database format (convertible to groups.io???), but only HTML digests and some ASCII. But I downloaded all the files and photos including description text (page content as ASCII). And I have no time to become moderator of any keyboard groups to reopen them. I only want to upload the stuff somewhere to fulfil my human right of culture preservation.

Where can I upload it? I ownly know filehosters for temporary storage, those delete it after 1 or 2 weeks. Are any of the groups already moved to groups.io?

I have managed to download the Casio groups (texts and attachments) before they got deleted.

Well, I obviously was reborn with the soul of a Brownie. I am writing on various complex hard sci-fi and fantasy movie scripts (trying hard to stay technically plausible) but not even manage to finish that, because I fail to imagine or remember names and properties of personas because I rather think in historical sequences of incidents rather than individuals causing them. (I grew up with Star-Trek, not the modern illogical zombie and vampire crap solely designed to place cliffhangers for wasting time and selling more ads while brutalizing the youth. The TV series "LOST" really cured me from expecting anything reasonable in long modern TV series. I neither have subscribed to any movie streaming service nor have cracked cards or keys in my Dreambox DM8000 (running at a 37cm PAL CRT) - it still only receives those about 80 free and national TV channels broadcast by the local cable TV service.) People often fear about A.I. starting a "rebellion of machines". IMO it is already there! But not as spectacular as in "Terminator", and not because programs have become conscious. But filterbubble algorithms were undoubtedly designed to increase profit by recommending similar things over and over again. So the way they now produce hate by throwing the straw out of all the people's heads onto one big stack until it self-combusts and sets democracy on fire is exactly that! And it is the pulsed microwaves of smartphones those make people's brains even more vulnerable against the stupidity spread by it 24/7. Buy radioactive toothpaste now for a radiant smile! That is to say, mobile radio is the radium of our time. Once upon a time radium was the hyped hitech craze built and mixed into everything (from children toys to soda water) to make things luminous and healthier and better in any way (websearch: "radium girls") until people discovered that their jaws rotted off from smoking those precious radioactive radium cigars. Nowadays exactly the same thing is happening with the such fashionable modern pulsed microwave products. People put smartphones under their bed pillow instructed by a special app to record their sleep phases (microwaving their brain while sending data to be processed through the cloud) until the overheating battery will finally set the bed ablaze. You can buy now toddler toys containing wifi or a smartphone compartment. And who on Earth needs a bluetooth toothbrush!? Between this insanity and radium toothpaste is absolutely no difference.

I am rather a tinker than good programmer; I often solve problems mechanically (connect 2 switches by a pull string) or with a couple of simple analogue parts (resistors, diodes) instead of writing code. I failed to finish university, not least because I have mild dyscalculia. I.e. despite I am clearly interested in math (even math theory), I completely messed up algebraic equations (forgetting terms or moving in circles) instead of systematically solving, because I confuse or forget parts of a formula in between. And that is to say, I have much more the mindedness of a Brownie than of a company worker - not of a hash brownie, but of that domestic helper ghost/Heinzelmännchen creature that invisibly works every night in the background but considers paid jobs exploitation and wears torn old clothes (me somewhat too - fashion is a disease of mankind made for planned obsolescence). Labour for quarterly figures destroys the planet. Enlightenment made me joint the uni and made me leave it again when I saw the direction computer science was turning into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownie_(folklore) I have more sympathy for a Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) than a Suckerberg or Larry Page. No, I will never drop bombs (causing sufferance ruins karma), but I am always waiting that the next wannabe Elon Musk will launch a homemade giant XXL Kassam rocket made from scrap parts into space, that releases enough shrapnel to start the Kessler effect to make all satellites of the orbits collide with each others to finally free the mankind from the always-online disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_effect The age of filterbubble-born hate and Cambridge Analytica's forged Trump election has turned internet into a nightmare. Down with devices built for total surveillance and pulsed microwaves! Once the internet was created to turn this world into a global village. Internet Of Things makes a Dementia Village of it. Id + IoT = IdIoT It's time to eradicate the noughties and start over again.

The Casio patents may help to decode it. It is not really data reduced (unlike MP3 or such) but only sections of recognizable samples alternating with short data sections. The operating system with all those softsynth algorithms is inside the main CPU, not these roms. Some Casio roms (e.g. MT-750) can not be listened that easily, but only because data and address lines were shuffled to simplify PCB layouts. Long ago Dtech helped me to decrypt it (I don't find the output anymore) - apparently he used a correlation algorithm. I also dumped the CTK-1000 rom, which was the largest stuff my Willem eprommer could read (using plenty of flimsy homemade adapter sockets).

In Germany we also have plenty of rebranded cookies made by the same companies (e.g. Aldi sells them). Because EU enforces codes for postal address on food product packages, they can be easily identified. The CPU inside my Canto HL-70 is labelled "KT64C-02A8, 130909" (28 pin COB, crystal clocked at 14.31818MHz). It apparently has 2 stereo channel outputs (printed on PCB) despite there is only one speaker installed. The slightly chorused timbres with aliasing distortion sound like a Holtek product, but I haven't dug deeper into the waveforms. By the way, also Casio made MQ- stuff. But these were melody calculator alarm clocks. Today I took PCB photos of a broken Casio MQ-1200 (based on ML-90 CPU) with the infamous LCD foil cable problem.

I am no good programmer. Beside example stuff done at the university I never finished coding anything in assembly or other low level language. I am just an autist idiot thinking in circles and spirals rather than straight forward. E.g. I have a "Bit 90" homecomputer with built-in Colecovision cart slot that refused to accept actual Colecovision joysticks in some games. In 1990th I found out that a digital signal on a pin needed to be delayed to prevent collision of the keypad data with those multiplexed from the internal keyboard of the machine, but instead of making a digital delay (shiftregister or what ever) I soldered a big inductor into the line, that undoubtly distorted the pulse waveform very badly but solved the problem well enough to make that game cartridge run properly. Or for connecting a PC diskette drive to Amiga, I needed both a DiskChange and Ready pulse, but the drive could generate only one of them (selected by a jumper), so I soldered the internal LED to the Ready pin (inverted through a transistor?) and the thing worked. At the moment my Trinitron CRT of my big SGI monitor is turning bad. It arcs inside the CRT when cold (loose or deformed contact, causing bright red flashes and emergency shutdown), so I designed a warmup timer from NE555 (not a microcontroller) that preheats the CRT heater while it simulates a bad capacitor in the PSU and so makes the monitor controller mainboard wait 30s before turning highvoltage on. The monitor still does not like cold air and often refuses to start, but at least turns on and can be used (I am now typing on it). That's the type of hacking I did in various devices.

I wonder why the slim case shape of the new Casio CT-S wasn't made much earlier anyway. After demise of wooden homeorgans and piano-lookalikes in 1980, the analogue Yamaha PortaSound PS-1, PS-2 and PS-3 (including robust carry case) were a great concept for making a really portable instrument (only the handle should fold away too). For a bigger control panel, laptop-style constructions (like Yamaha PS-6100) should have become standard. But instead of this, keyboards in 1990th grew bulkier and bulkier again at least until 2000 (e.g. Casio CT-X, MZ-2000), despite modern powerful digital synth hardware fits now into a smartphone or RasPi, and nothing beside speaker size justifies a clumsy case. (Only the infamous silicone roll-up pianos were an exception.) So the arise of Casio CT-S is a logical step that should have come much earlier. Bigger keyboards IMO should always have a laptop-style foldable panel to save space and keep dust out.