New Open-Source G2 Editor RFC

ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

By the way, I have an Apple M4 MBP on order, so should be able to test my ‘C’ next week.

ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

Having a good dig into JUCE today. That might be the way forward for the GUI.

Not going to be easy though! Pretty advanced JUCE, and I'm only getting to grips with the basics!

ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

Now I have an M4 machine, I found what look like a couple of bugs in the implementation on there. One makes sense, just didn't hit it on the Intel machine.

One looks like a bug in the Apple IOKit layers. An interrupt message contains an extended data response! Worked around it for now.

GitHub repository contains the fixes.

hyperstationjr · Posted: Wed Dec 11, 2024 10:57 am Post subject:

I’m a long-time G2 user with a professional background in graphic design. I’ve not worked on application UI but I have done plenty of website UI and UX design. I’m not sure how much help I’d be but certainly willing to lend a hand. Feel free to reach out, happy to discuss more and assist where I can.

ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

Eag · Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2024 12:24 pm Post subject:

ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

All. I'm making progress.

Rendering a couple of modules, which have some working parameters reading/writing to the synth. The GUI dials work. Buttons also work.

...and breaking news - my first cable connecting modules!

If there are any 'C' or C++ programmers around here who want to get involved, drop me a line. This is quite a big set of work for one person to finish and I'm potentially getting involved in a day-job contract soon!

Screenshot 2025-02-22 at 4.13.14 pm.png

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Houston, we have a cable!

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ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

This is the old editor representation of the same very simple patch, for comparison. So, module representation is working. Need to populate all the different module types (which is arguably the main slog). Lots of other work to do for completion: file access, variations, module creation/deletion and dragging etc. cable creation/deletion. All the stuff which needs to go onto menus.

Also want to make the module area zoom-able, which should be possible.

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ChrisPurusha · Joined: Sep 09, 2024 Posts: 17 Location: UK

Work-in-progress now published as open-source here:

https://github.com/chrispurusha/G2-Edit

nord_balls · Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2025 4:21 pm Post subject:

Wow I somehow missed all this action! @ChrisParusha sorry to miss these posts and great progress. I have a progress report, everything is visible at https://github.com/sirlensalot/g2fx . I can also give a report on my compilation attempts of the Delphi code.

1. USB/Protocol. This is pretty much done from a read perspective, the only part I haven't gotten to is writing data back. It does read and write to patch and perf files though. It features a complete wire protocol for pretty much every read datatype.

2. GUI with JavaFX. I decided to bite the bullet and with AI help start work on a JavaFX frontend. I'll put a better screenshot up, but for now I have a working editor frame -- global, editor and patch toolbars wired up. For instance morph knobs switch on slot and variation, load meters work, etc.

I'm interested in help but not sure the project is ready for it. Currently I'm evaluating approaches for drawing modules. Using data from the Delphi open-source project is a decent approach, but it leans on image data a lot and maybe looks a little clunky compared to ian-s code. Ian-s js module code (really JSON) is more attractive, but the inability to get a response on reuse or better a license is a deterrent. Probably going to proceed with drawing from the open-source data and tuning that, since it's GPL. At some point I need to harmonize my BSD3 contribs with the source GPL (g2ools is also GPL). Once that framework is settled the long haul of getting the 180+ modules drawn begins.

Anyway, JavaFX seems like a controversial choice, but given the sorry state of crossplatform desktop frontend dev in 2025, it's almost the least-bad. The css support alone makes it not completely embarrassing, and it's not going away anytime soon. It helped that I independently came across JavaFX editors for other open source music hardware things like XFM. In any case thanks to LLMs I've made rapid progress there and have a working backend-UI architecture.

DELPHI CODE: I got a Win11 ARM VM running, and tried building ... no go. There's a 32bit UI library in heavy use that has simply not been ported to new architectures. This was a big reason for eventually deciding to dive into GUI coding, as I see no way forward investing in some new Delphi UI lib.

@ChrisPurusha feel free to join this effort, or conversely crib anything you like! I know java isn't everyone's cup of coffee.

EDIT as far as module-drawing goes, I have a yaml file which puts the Delphi Gen1 module .txt files into a single file. Next step there is to write png files for all the text-encoded data as there's a lot of duplication, and write the png filenames back to the yaml as the final touch. https://github.com/sirlensalot/g2fx/blob/main/src/main/resources/org/g2fx/g2gui/module-uis-1.yaml

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