Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

At 08:38 PM 4/14/01, you wrote:
>Well, for better or worse, I just got a VFX-SD (no manuals, no disks,
>blah, blah, blah). I'm about to order a set of manuals if the
>original owner can't find hers, but what I am wondering is this:
>
>1) Would anyone be willing to contribute to a user-written user
>manual? Basically, I am thinking that this would be canonical free
>documentation for anyone unlucky enough to wind up without the
>manuals.


It would be a huge project,unfortunately. The VFX series isn't a 'simple' 
synth like many modern synths (romplers). As you've probably discovered, 
many of the 'option' buttons are multi-page, and there are simply huge 
amounts of things that can be changed.

That said, perhaps a set of 'HOWTO's would be in order, just the basics 
sort of thing, and specifics on how to achieve certain things (MIDI 
controller setups, etc)

Remember that the official 'manual' is actually 2 books, the user manual 
and the programming manual (you had to buy it seperately), each fairly 
thick and heavy reading... The user manual still contains a lot of info on 
programming though, so there is probably a bit of duplication.


>2) Does anyone know if this sort of thing is legal? It probably is if
>we don't borrow from Ensoniq docs, but I'd hate to get sued.


It would be perfectly legal as long as no copyrights are infringed, which 
means you can't just copy segments out of the official manuals. But I doubt 
that would be what anyone would want to do anyway...



>3) Anyone have any idea if it's possible to get the source for the
>OS? I would guess "no", but it never hurts to ask ...


There is at least one ex-ensoniq (or current, I don't know) employee on the 
list, so if they want to look into this... But my guess would be 'no'. The 
OS is on ROMs anyway, its just the sequencer OS thats disk-loaded.

The SQ80 crowd however have reverse engineered their OS roms, and have a 
place on the net where you can download custom OS's and even a CGI based 
'ROM builder' which will customize a set of rom images to your options.

Shame we don't have the same kinda people in our crowd, but thats life. 
Besides, the VFX OS is pretty good compared to the SQ80 which had some 
fairly major failings in the official OS's, from what I've seen, and as 
they say necessity breeds invention...

About the only thing that is lacking from the SD-1's OS that I can think of 
off the top of  my head, is the ability to assign the mod wheel to a 
specific CC#, and being able to send Volume messages from the volume 
slider. They are fairly minor, and probably wouldn't warrant reverse 
engineering. Oh, and it would be nice to be able to assign a SINGLE foot 
switch to any of the 5 foot switch choices - I still haven't gotten the 
double foot switch I need for sost.


Even if someone had the source, or reverse engineered the OS, it would 
still rely on people having EPROM programmers to be able to rewrite new 
OS's. A luxury not many have...