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Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

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RE: [Ensoniq-VFX-SD] .SYX on Floppy?

2012-07-31 by Gary Brumm

…same reason they don’t support large floppies…the floppy format is obsolete. There is a program; I believe it’s called Format Factory,

(not to be confused by the media format program that is much newer) and it will format any floppy format or copy any existing formatted

floppy sector by sector. I don’t know if the program is still available but it is the most comprehensive floppy program I have ever seen. I no longer

use floppies due to their low capacity, slow speed, and dependability issues (more with the old drives than the media in my experience.

I may be able to find and share my copy as I am sure it must be public domain by now and I believe it was free in the first place.

Gary

From: Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com [mailto:Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Mark Wiens
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 10:17 AM
To: Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Ensoniq-VFX-SD] .SYX on Floppy?

Keep in mind that Microsoft, in their great wisdom decided it was not necessary to low level floppy support, including 720k floppy creation in their operating systems after Windows 98.

Mark


On Jul 31, 2012, at 9:55 AM, Christian Brunschen <cb@df.lth.se> wrote:

Sounds are encoded very simply in a .SYX fie; they contain a short header, then a nybble-encoded dump of the sound data as it is stored in memory and indeed as it is stored on floppy; and a brief trailer. So unpacking them should be doable. The details are in the VFX-SD Musicians Manual, http://soundprogramming.net/manuals/Ensoniq_VFX-SD_Manual.pdf in Appendix A.

Once the .SYX files have been unpacked to 'raw' sound program files, they need to be put on a floppy.

To access the floppies themselves, to read or write the bare contents of a floppy, there is OmniFlop:

And to access the contents of the filesystem on the floppy, there's the EnsoniqFS plugin for TotalCommander:

Together these should allow full access to read and I think write to Ensoniq-formatted floppies, including VFX-SD ones. So all in all it should be possible to take the .SYX files and put them onto a floppy.

Best wishes,

// Christian Brunschen

On Jul 31, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Daniel Forró wrote:



Jammie,

SMF is used not only for songs, of course also for SysEx memory bulk dump... It differs from SYX format just in small details in header.

Daniel

On Aug 1, 2012, at 1:28 AM, jammie wrote:



it only does midi song data not sysex data

as i have the soft on a win98 pc and it needs to use the msdos

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 3:57 PM

Subject: Re: [Ensoniq-VFX-SD] .SYX on Floppy?

This software works with SMF, not SysEx format, and it's MS-DOS
software.

Daniel Forro

On Jul 31, 2012, at 11:31 PM, <tomlinson6050@roadrunner.com> <tomlinson6050@roadrunner.com
> wrote:
>
> Hi. Go to www.giebler.com
> He sells software that can write sysex data on disks with the
> correct Ensoniq format.
> Only problem is you will need an older computer running Windows 95
> or 98.
> Bill



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