It’s been a long journey, but I finally have the ApOPL3xy hardware and software to the point where I can call it version 1.0. I’ll make another post in a few days with links to the firmware source code, the PCB design files, and emulator binaries. (Update: here’s that post.) But for now, I just want to show it off a little.

MIDI Player

One of the things I’ve added to the firmware recently is the ability to play MIDI files from the SD card. Here are a few videos of this in action. These videos are a little dark. It was hard to find a balance between blowing out the display and making the videos way too dark, so I did the best I could. I mapped the MIDI channels to somewhat arbitrary output audio channels to make the VU meters a little more interesting.

PCB Photos

Here are some high(ish) resolution photos of the assembled Rev 3 board, for those who are into that sort of thing. Also included is a photo of the bodges necessary on the Rev 2 board. To view the images at full resolution, right-click (or long-press) the image and select “Open Image in New Tab ” or similar.

Future Work

Now that the ApOPL3xy has reached this milestone, I’ll probably leave it alone for a while. But, such things are never truly finished. I have several ideas for user interface improvements, such as patch and bank copying, M3U playlist support, and most interesting to me, a drum machine mode (suggested by a co-worker). I’m sure I’ll come back to this eventually to make these and other improvements, but it sure feels good to be able to call it done (for now)!