First, some facts on what this is all about.

PPG’s 340/380 is a wavetable based synthesizer with highly customizable partial waves, 8 voices and a built-in sequencer. It consists of three 19″ boxes, each of them being 3 units high, connected with a 50 wire bus cable.

The PPG 340A, called Generator Unit,  contains the Waveomputer 360A’s main board, fitted with four generator boards making up a total of 8 independent voices together with a modified TONR (wave memory) board and the former IO board less the 6802 processor and many other parts.

The PPG 340B is the Processor Unit, containing a new processor board called PER, featuring a 6802 CPU, some RAM, an UART connecting a serial terminal to the 340B, a timer chip, some I/O and circuitry to operate a mini cassette drive. Furthermore, 32kBytes of RAM and 4kBytes of ROM are installed in the 340B. The ROMs originally hold the boot loader allowing to boot the system from mini cassettes.

The third unit is the PPG 380 Event Generator, a highly programmable sequencer. Equipped with the same CPU, ROM and RAM boards as the 340B but with slightly more (48kBytes) RAM it was also booting its actual intelligence from mini cassette. A dual port RAM board interfaces the Event Generator to the mentioned 50 wire bus allowing for high speed messaging from the sequencer unit to the Wavecomputer.

This machine is different from the factory version in so far as Armin Stöwe has promoted it to talk PPG Bus. This way the 340B and 380 are fed with machine code and wave data via the Waveterm, samples can be edited, saved to and loaded from the Waveterm and maybe much, much more… Too sad that we can’t ask Armin about that anymore.