ColdFusion is the COBOL of web programming… there is some human at an insurance/mortgage servicing company thats not had to learn a new tag in 5 years pulling in 200k.
Around the time this page was written I was still building enormously graphic-rich websites in Adobe Flash, which was my first introduction to real programming. For whatever reason, despite most of Flash's functionality being incorporated into (and deployment issues being resolved by) modern Javascript, I've done a complete 180 and gone in the other direction. All of my hobby web-design is completely Spartan in comparison. Almost as a rebellion against the excesses of the modern web, so many developers now pride themselves on how minimal we can make our sites!
There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.
(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)
[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.
It's a really good question why Casio didn't continue making synths after the 80s. It's possible that the entire CZ-line was intended to be a one-off response to Yamaha's breakaway success with the DX7. After the CZ-line, it looks like Casio tried to keep up with Yamaha for a few years, but exited the market after Yamaha launched the SY-line. From what I understand, the CZ-series were great sellers then, but even with all of the nostalgia they'd never move large numbers now.
For what it's worth, Yamaha aren't particularly nostalgic about their cult-classic synths either. I guess that from their perspective, the DX7 and CZ-101 were already obsolete within a few short years. By 1990 the sound had already become quite dated, and technology had moved on. Now that they've become popular again as a cult-classic, the margin just isn't there anymore because of the market share of software, or cheap independent FM/PD synths.
Shameless plug, in case anyone is interested, I've done some work reverse-engineering some of these synths:
Awesome. When I was researching the CZ 101 (still am, actually), I spent some time reading the MAME implementation, including the NEC upd933 chip emulation. I was going to say I'm surprised I didn't find your docs, but it looks like they were all published late last year which is precisely when I was doing my research (I used the holiday to work on some projects I'd been stewing on in the back of my mind, and a phase distortion plugin was one of them).
I don't know why I find that era of synth so enjoyable and interesting, but I do. I love every FM synth, but that side of things feels pretty well covered by existing tools. Korg makes the OpSix (and I have two), Yamaha has the reface DX and I think their workstations still ship an AFM engine, and there are at least a half dozen plugins that are mostly quite accurate, and a handful of other hardware options.
Phase distortion just feels more neglected, so that's the one I've been spending time on. I have an excellent engine running, which is more accurate than the Arturia CZ V engine (at least compared to my actual CZ 101, maybe they were comparing against another model, but the MAME engine is also like the real CZ and not like Arturia, so I am inclined to say Arturia got sloppy), but I'm going pretty slow on the UI. Making a nice plugin UI for a synth that didn't have a nice UI is a challenge. You can't just copy the original UI if you want it to be fun to use.
In case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/
The Sequential Prophet X is another modern synth with a full-blown x86 PC running inside it. You can see the mainboard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8QDCocnt0M
Really awesome work! A simple OS for retro x86 hardware is a really cool project! I wish I still had some era-appropriate hardware I could test-drive it on.
When the author says 'I tend to run older hardware', how old do they mean? I'm typing this message right now on my Thinkpad x220 from 2011, which is unfortunately too old to run Zed because its internal Intel HD graphics card doesn't support Vulkan. I'd be an everyday user if not for this.
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