Emax

*Newsflash*

Today I managed to transfer banks between my Mac Classic and my Emax 
Plus with Sound Designer for Emax 1.12.
I just had to hack the Emax OS a little bit :-)


*More information*

Just like Sound Designer for Emulator II, the SD for Emax 1.12 
software has a special menu item for sending and receiving complete 
banks via RS422.
But... it didn't work until now because Digidesign hardcoded 
a "version revision" test of the Emax operating system.
According to SD for Emax you must have a "rev 4.0 or higher" to be 
able to use these features. And as we all know, none of the Emax OS 
have this high rev. number.
(Well, the software seems to accept the Emax II OS 2.14, but 
unfortunately the Emax II OS doesn't support the bank load/unload 
feature)

Emu did however add support for fast bank transfer in some of the 
available OS versions.
So I thought: let's hack the OS and increase the revision number in 
it...
So I created an Emax Plus OS rev 4.0 :-) and guess what: 
SoundDesigner for Emax accepts this hacked version as a 4.0 one !
...and moreover the transfer function works 100% !

The total transfer time for loading banks from Mac to Emax takes 25 
seconds. The opposite direction takes about 40 seconds, which is a 
bit slow but fortunately this transfer direction is not that 
interesting...

This feature is a perfect alternative for people owning an Emax 
without SCSI, especially the Emax with rev1 boards.

One important note however: this "hack" does not work on all Emax OS 
versions. 
To be more accurate: although Sound Designer accepts ALL hacked Emax 
OS versions as a "4.0 or higher", some of these Emax OS simply do not 
support bank transfers.
Following versions succeeded in my tests:
- Emax SE 1.1
- Emax HD SE 1.1
- Emax Plus 1.0
But the other ones do not support the fast bank transfer option:
- Emax 3.2
- Emax HD 1.1

I guess this is not a big problem, because as far as I know one or 
more of the "OK" versions can also be used on "non OK" Emax samplers, 
right ?
E.g. I think it's possible to run the Emax SE 1.1 on a basic non-SE 
Emax, right ?

It's strange though that the Emax 3.2 does not support the bank 
transfer option, since Emulatorarchive mentions that this version 
added OMI CDROM support and I assume that these CD drives used the 
very same bank transfer method...

Conclusion:
I you have an old Mac (Classic, Classic II), Sound Designer for Emax 
1.12 (hard to find, see message 3741) and an appropriate cable (see 
Emulatorarchive), you can transfer banks between the Emax and the Mac 
if your Emax accepts the SE, HD SE or Plus OS.
All you need is a hacked version of the OS, which I can put somewhere 
in the files section if people are interested.

///E-Synthesist