Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

On 30 Mar 2012, at 19:21, fddi wrote:

> Hello,

Hi Rick!

> today I Received my "new" sd-1 with 21 voices.
> there are a few diskettes with patches.
> A few questions.
> If I load the diskettes with parches, the default bank will be 
> overwritten the same way it is on ESQ1 ?

The SD-1 has a couple banks of ROM sound programs, as well as one RAM bank - and space for an (E)EPROM cartridge that can hold another one. Each bank holds 60 sound programs. Whatever you load from floppy will be loaded into RAM. But: there are files that hold a single sound program, or 30, or 60. Loading a 60-program file obviously replaces all RAM sound programs.

Either way, though, what I'd suggest is: find a diskette with some space free, and save the current contents to a new file - both the sounds and, if there are any, the songs and sequences. Incidentally, you can save a single file that holds the entire set of songs/sequences and sounds to a single file. This way you can load other sounds however much you want, because you can always reload the sounds you saved!

> Is there a operation to restore the default patches ?

There are a lot of sounds built in in ROM; those will always stay there.

> I do not have the default preset ensoniq sd-1 disk, is there any sysex 
> available for the preset patches ?

The OS disk contains the factory sounds; you can download the OS disk from the files section for this mailing list, and you can write a new floppy disk from that using the EDE program that you can also download from the files section.

> THis SD-1 has 3.0 firwmare version.
> Does it worth to upgrade to version 4.10 ?

It's not a difficult upgrade - you swap two EPROM chips for two replacement EPROM chips. In my view, it's probably worth upgrading to have the latest-and-best version.

> I still have to learn everything about SD-1...
> thank you very much

Enjoy! :)

> Rick

// Christian