Elektron Musical Instruments

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Gisle Martens Meyer wrote:

> I noticed during the crash (while computer displayed bluescreen) that
> the Sidstation MIDI activity went crazy. All four leds blinked
> frantically.

When this happens the diodes have nothing to do with what is printed next
to them. The frantic flickering just means that the processor has made a
"bezerk crash" and is currently destroying your patch memory! :) Notice
that all of the LED's were flickering - not just MIDI data.

> So what happened - did it crash because it received bad MIDI signals?
> Can a computer crash result in the computer spitting out dangerous MIDI
> signals?

Sounds very unlikely. If the SidStation receives illegal MIDI messages it
will reset. The only dangerous occasion is if it receives the exact 
patchdump header, and the messages continues for too long, overwriting the
memory. But getting the MIDI interface to output this message just by
coincidence is like one one on a billion.

> Does the Sidstation do Active sensing or something? Will a computer
> crash trouble that?

The SidStation ignores Active sensing! :)

> What can I do to prevent this from happening again? 

Mystery crashes are hard to avoid. Could be that the same thing that got
your PC to crash also crashed the SidStation (really high electromagnetic
interference, or power supply failure).

   __
__///Daniel Hansson           |   SidStation - MOS6581 Synthesis
\XX/ daniel@...   |         www.sidstation.com