----- Original Message -----From: Windrum ScogginSent: Wednesday, February 05, 2014 6:48 PMSubject: Re: [emax] RE: Resurrecting an Emax HD rack - Issues keep mounting
Problem with people getting rid of their spare hard drives is the fact that the Emax tries to boot off it first and if it doesn't see the FDD and is a SCSI HD model will then go to look for the SCSI HD. If neither or present, it won't boot. If it is a NON SCSI HD model it has to have an FDD or it just won't boot. Its a moot point but I have no idea why EMU NEVER opted to have the OS on flash rom so the damned machine would load off the internal Flash ROM like all their later units did. Ensoniq did the same stupid thing. No FDD with OS on it, NO Load. Machine useless. Stupid.Anyway, that's neither hear nor there. If I were you, I would go HxC Floppy emulator then use your laptop running EMXP and load your stuff onto an SD card via EMXP and screw the the FDD. I am eventually going to do the same. Plus, you are in Europe and the HxC is made there by Lotharek, who is in Poland. Check out this youtube link and I am sure our buddy RetroSound could steer you the rest of the way in making this happen. I certainly am going this route, even if I keep SCSI HD and PCD-50B's in my Emax cause I am just sick of the FDD nightmare on these machines.
On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 9:50 AM, <picabostreets@...> wrote:
I got it to boot again and it successfully sampled and played back via midi... then it eventually failed again, prompting me to insert a disk. The OS will sometimes load successfully on start up, but it will work for a given period, then suddenly the HD's access to the OS will fail. When it is loaded, it seems to have full functionality.
So it sounds like Ted is right... both the HD and floppy drive have to be replaced. If I understand correctly, I have 3 options... 1) install a replacement HD that is formatted with the emax hd pre-se 1.1 OS and not replace the floppy... 2) install a floppy drive replacement and slim floppy and load the OS from there, 3) replace both. I'm on a student budget so money is a concern...
Would anybody out there have a spare hard drive they could sell me? Or for that matter, a spare floppy drive? I'm located in London (Canada), but I'm near the US border and could pick up there...
Again, any tips or advice is greatly appreciated. I don't want the emax to sit in my closet anymore...
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Message
Re: [emax] RE: Resurrecting an Emax HD rack - Issues keep mounting
2014-02-05 by jammie
its not stupid they did it for a reason if back
then you had a machine that had the os on rom
if any updates you had to remove roms and add new
ones
with os loaded by floppy any new os implimentation
it just had to be written to floppy as extra code and it would load the new
set
when emu went onto upgrading to se and hd bigger
roms were needed and why you have to remove and put in the bigger
chip
memory and roms weere expensive so if you could get
away with a rom with an instruction set that the os pointed to you could use
smaller roms cheaper and use floppy disks very cheap to impliment new
features
it ok by todays standards as memory is cheap
and if they had cf cards and usb back then they
would of used it like new synths do today
but we are talking about 1986/7 and why machines
had tiny ram it was so expensive
a 4mb simm back then for a mac was £300 they are
pennies now nut back then it was expensive
kurzweil introduced the k2000 in 1990 and it had
fixed roms when you upgraded it cost £100 each time there were many rom upgrades
you had to send in your own roms and they would send you back used roms with os
on updated to latest spec
many years later they did the k2500 and the later
models allowed you to use the floppy to upgrade the os by flashing flashrom
but most samplers i have use a flioppy for loading
the os from disk if not a hd connected
most sampler types today are hybrid romplers and
batched on sampler players so require rom os