Emax

Similar story for me. 

I was living in Taiwan for most of the second half of 2008, during 
which time I no access to my Emax II samplers. Since I got back to 
Australia I have been slaving over a hot soldering iron to repair 
some critical studio equipment that had broken down and was holding 
up several projects. Now that is done so I can get back to the Emax 
II. I was also waiting on the UARTs which were back ordered and only 
arrived last week. 

While in Taiwan I was not idle. I searched around and tried out 
various USB-RS232 and USB-RS422 interfaces. Most had problems with 
drivers or supported baud rates and eventually I ended up with a 
multiport PCI-RS232 card. I have that installed on my desktop PC here 
and it seems to be working fine for the PC end.

I also did some research into the hardware on the Macintosh computers 
that were contemporary to the Emax. I can see now that the choices 
made by Emu in designing their interface hardware are fairly specific 
to the requirements of the Mac. But at least now I know what to 
implement for the Emax II-Mac RS422 emulation :)

The weather here will be over 40 degrees Celsius for the next few 
days so I think I will wire wrap the prototype. I am not sure how 
much time I will have to write the firmware as I have to go back to 
Taiwan next week. But if I can get a working prototype going then I 
can make a proper board and we can take it from there. 

When I am back in Taiwan I plan to visit some of the better USB-RS422 
interface makers and see if it is possible make one of their 
interfaces work in synchronous mode. 

/Tristan 


--- In emax@yahoogroups.com, mr julian <jujulilianan@...> wrote:
>
> 
> esynthesist wrote:
> 
> >Some members on this board were also trying to build a piece of 
> >hardware which can "replace" the RS422 ports of the old Mac, and 
> >which can be connected to a new PC or Mac. Once this is done, it's 
a 
> >simple thing to create software for both Windows and Mac which is 
> >able to do exactly what you're asking for.
> >But I didn't hear from those guys for some time anymore, so I 
assume 
> >their experiments are not successful :-)
> >  
> >
> slowly slowly...... rome wasn't burnt in a day!
> :-)
> 
> I made a list of the parts I needed through work, knowing an order 
was 
> going out that week, but then the parts I wanted didn't get 
actually 
> ordered from mouser for ages. And then just before xxxmas when I 
got the 
> parts, my main computer with the dev environment I was using for 
the 
> software blew up.
> 
> Anyway.... I have the RS422 driver and receiver ICs I need now, and 
the 
> computer kind of working again.
> 
> Only problem now, is I have 2 gigs in the next 3 weeks..... and the 
2nd 
> one is looking like it might be pretty big, so need to be well 
rehearsed 
> for it (and our laptop we use for gigs is also malfunctioning for 
audio 
> right now.... waaaah!).
> 
> but I'm very sure I can get this device to work, when I have a 
chance. 
> Next step is to make the serial port run at MIDI data rate of 31250 
and 
> after that, 250k synchronous.
> 
> I *should* be able to make it do this just with the standard 
windows 
> serial port driver, as long as I have an app to send those baud 
rate 
> commands to it. Otherwise I might have to take over standard serial 
port 
> speeds...
> :-)
> 
> 
> 
> anyway - please keep hassling me about this (maybe after the 15th 
feb) 
> to make sure I get this done. I really want to dump samples with my 
emax 
> too!!
>