Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

Hi VFX friends,

I've converted the VFX program library 'The Lot' into VFX usable sysex
files.
There is also a list of the contents.

As a further Christmas present to the group I decided to release some tools
I believe to be helpful:
It's a suite of command line programs to deal with VFX disks
and sysex files containing VFX programs.

You'll receive a separate email with the upload notification amd the link.

I wrote these programs out of several reasons:

Firstly I had to get some order into the lots of sysex files and
using Soundlib, which is a great program, is one thing but still not
knowing what's in the different files is another thing - not to talk
about the problem how I could easily find identical programs coming
with different names or identify the minor changes which make the
difference in simlar programs. This is where the following
programs are helpful:

vlst	 Print programs with checksums from VFX sysex file.
vcmp	 Compare two programs from VFX sysex file(s).

Secondly, when I acquired a VFX-SD, I herited a million diskettes
and you know it's hard to explore what's on them, let alone the fact
that you quickly realize how unreliable old disks are. I wanted
to store the disks contents on my PC and find a way to handle
faulty (or maybe faulty?) disks. Here is how I dealt with this:

vrdf	 Read VFX and EPS disks and create an image file.
vwri	 Write VFX or EPS disks from an image file.
vfrf	 Format VFX disks.

vdir	 Print directory from VFX disk image file.
vexa	 Extract all files from VFX image file.
vext	 Extract single files from VFX image file.
vblk	 Get last used block number from VFX image file.

And finally it seems to be hard to get hold of a copy of Gary
Gieblers software, although his website is still online, and when
I tried to find out if his programs would work under XP or Win98
(with this strange VFX diskette format!) I suddenly found myself
deeply in programming and just couldn't stop...
However, I couldn't have done it without Gary's article on the
VFX diskette formats and I never intended to reimplement his
software. When you read the descriptions and try out the programs
you will find some useful features which I think are not included
in the Giebler SW (without having seen it).

Have a look into the readme file for instructions. Let me know
when you have questions or find bugs but don't expect me to
answer within hours...

Merry Christmas and a happy new year

Hans