On 9/14/2011 2:19 PM, Frankie Fisher wrote:
> I have been looking at doing a driver for the Roland U220 at the
> moment and that uses the same memory-mapped bulk data transfer as the
> MT32, I wonder if there is scope for commonality between some of the
> Roland drivers.
I think I put that idea forward a long time ago; the idea of having
common methods for a whole manufacturer, since a manufacturer will often
use certain data encoding methods in several synths. So, we could have a
bunch of general Roland routines in synthdrivers.Roland and then the
individual synths could be below that (like synthdrivers.Roland.BS420).
The general consensus, as I recall, was "don't do that". For starters,
it creates interdependency between synthdrivers (ie, it would break the
possibility of having plugable/modularized synthdrivers). The other fear
was this. Suppose that Roland comes out with some synth, the BFD-100.
Someone makes a synthdriver for it, along with some data decoding
routines in the "common" Roland section.
Then, Roland comes out with another synth, the BFD-200, and someone else
starts writing a synthdriver for *that*. Let's say that the data
encoding in the BFD-200 is just a *little* different, such that the
author of the BFD-200 synthdriver thinks that the *first* author made a
slight mistake in the common code (and the second author doesn't know
the specifics of the BFD-100, so they really don't know) and they change
it to work properly for this BFD-200. This could break the BFD-100 driver.
Of course, that doesn't stop you from just copying some code from other
Roland drivers. The downside is that, if a actual bug *is* found in
either copy, there's little likelihood that the person who fixes it will
know to go fix it in the other drivers.
- Joe
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