[Bea Thurman] had a retro music conundrum. She loved the classic Greengate DS:3 sampler, but couldn’t buy one, and couldn’t find enough information to build her own. [Bea’s] plea for help caught the attention of [Eric Schlaepfer], aka [TubeTime]. The collaboration that followed ultimately solved a decades-old mystery.
In the 1980s, there were two types of musicians: Those who could afford a Fairlight CMI and everyone else. If you were an Apple II owner, the solution was a Greengate DS:3. The DS:3 was a music keyboard and a sampler card for the Apple II+ (or better). The plug-in card was a bit mysterious, though. The cards were not very well documented, and only a few survive today. To make matters worse, some chips had part numbers sanded off. It was a bit of a mystery until [Bea and Tubetime] got involved.
Eric Schlaepfer
While [Bea] didn’t have the card itself, she had a photo of the board and a picture of an album that contained the key to everything. The Greengate came packed with a vinyl album, “Into Trouble with the Noise of Art.” An apt title, since the album art was the Greengate PCB top layer. Now if you know [Eric], you know he wrote the book (literally) on taking things apart and taking photos of them, even producing replicas.
Thoroughly nerdsniped, [Eric] loaded the photos KiCad and started tracing. With the entire top layer artwork and most of the bottom layer, the 8-bit card wasn’t too hard to figure out. The sticky point was one chip. A big 40-pin part with the ..
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