Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

Jonas,

The 7 times power up reset thing is somewhat documented.

http://www.mcwest.org/~mccreary/vfx/

To quote:

------------------------------------------------------------
My VFX is completely frozen! What do I do?

    Talking about turning power on/off seven times to get a reset,
    Nick said he couldn't believe it.

    Well, Nick, here's what I remember of it. Someone had the problem
    that the diplay would come up, and then only partially draw the
    "initializing" display, and then hang. They called Ensoniq and
    were told to power-cycle seven times, always turning off the
    machine at a particular point in the power-up sequence. On the
    seventh time, the display came up with something like
    "RE-INITIALIZE?" and if you answer yes, everything gets wiped.

    I no longer have my back issues of the Hacker, and I haven't saved
    the notes string that mentioned it, but I believe Johnny Klonaris
    was involved in the string.

    As for ridiculous, well, sometimes firmware designers do require
    strange interactions to hide functions that they don't want the
    customer to accidentally execute. Why, here at HP, .... anyway, I
    wouldn't put it past 'em. Haven't tried it, but it IS in the
    Hacker, sometime in 1990. In the letters section.

Jim (I see no cave here...) Smith <smithj@...> 
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This sort of thing is usually for hanging type problems, where
something prevents the system from responding to button presses at
all.  I doubt it will help Tom's problem, but I guess he has nothing
to lose by trying it.

--> Steve

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 09:42:04AM +0200, Jonas H\ufffdkansson wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Once a long time ago my VFX SD hung up in a strange way. It was so
> long ago that I don't remember properly but it was something like
> this: I turned it on and it locked and did not start up as
> normal. Some kind of start up process lockup. I did not know much
> about electronics back then so I did not dare to open it and start
> to look for errors. But after some days I got tired of the situation
> and in desperation I turned the VFX SD on and off several of times
> rapidly. And guess what! When I have done that 6-7 times the
> software lockup was gone!! In some way the keyboard rebooted and it
> worked like normal again. It has never been any problem since. So
> switching the powerbutton on-off several of times is some kind of
> signal to the software to reinitialize or what do you guys think???
-- 
Steve Wahl    steve@...

<classyhorse23>  I had to google "jfgi" to see what it meant. The irony
is overwhelming.
    -- bash.org #761884