Buchla 700 Preservation Page – Aaron D Lanterman

“Hey Don, wherever you are, know that while the Buchla 700 didn’t quite work out as expected at least it was on Twin Peaks.Totally worth it.” — Alessandrso Cortini, @blindoldfreak on Twitter, 5:09 AM, June 26, 2017

This page is devoted to information about the Buchla 700. (I do not own, nor have I ever owned, a Buchla 700; nor have I have ever even seen one in person. I’m just fascinated by them. I did bid on one once on e-bay, but I dropped out when the bid went over $5K.)

Resources

Source code for the Buchla 700, courtesy Lynx Crowe, provided for noncommercial personal and educational use. This code is provided as-is with no guarantees of completeness or correctness; it’s a compilation of various bits of relevant code that Lynx found going through his archives. If you want to delve into this, you are “on your own.” Development was done with an Alcyon C compiler on an Atari 1040ST, although it should be feasible to find a modern compiler that will handle this code. Knowledgeable people with time on their hands could potentially do all sorts of neat things with this, such as (a) create some sort of hardware/software upgrade to the 700 that would allow users to bypass the trouble-prone and difficult-to-find video chip, (b) add features to and fix bugs in the software, and (c) create a softsynth rendition of the 700. It’s also a fantastic chance to look at the design of a synth OS by one of the pioneers in the field. Please give Lynx and Don proper acknowledgement on anything you do with this.
Intel 82716VSDD datasheet, MHS 82716VSDD datasheet (from the Buchla 700 Yahoo! Group) – replicating the 82716 using an FPGA is theoretically possible, and a potentially interesting project, although it would probably be quite difficult.

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