Emax

A few comments.

("What I'd be inclined to do is just copy the EEPROM
from the 8M machine")

Last time I looked the EEPROM was soldered to the board you mean to tell me that someone wiling to sacrafice a perfectly working EmaxII to an overheated pc board when removing the chip let alone loosing the chip?

("The PALs can be easily reverse-engineered.  Quite simple.  Pull the PALs
from a known good 8M Emax II, power them up on a test bench, then feed
inputs in and see what comes out. ")
  
I can verify beyond a shadow of a doubt that the PALs from Emu have the fusible link blown.
this means that you can't just read the PAL. By testing IO you may solve the logic but will you solve the RAS & CAS timing issues associated with the dynamic ram timing?  

The other problem is that the EmaxII is obsolete. Useful yes but not necessarily worth such a gallant effort. I have purchased EmaxII racks with 8mb for as little as $120.00 and I beleive that as they go by the wayside that you will find the parts you need to convert the EmaxII without the extended effort.  

Upside: I applaude the effort and if it works I may be interested in the upgrade.  

Downside: Anybody who wants to do this has a tremendous amount of work ahead of them probably not worth the effort. You can buy an ESI32 for around $200.00 and use midi to play the sounds with your Emax II. Then you have the capability of 32 MB, Emax/Emax II, Akai, and EIIIX library.

Currently I beleive that you can purchase an EmaxII memory upgrade kit from Mik at Sound Logic and I beleive it has the fabeled upgrade disk needed to write the EEPROM.  

Thank you group,
Skip
----- Original Message -----
From: Gordon Pearce
Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 5:16 AM
To: emax@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [emax] Re: Memory Help Please.

> Hi,
> The Route66 upgrade will be cool if it works out, but how do you propose
> duplicating the memory settings in the Emax II EEPROM that the upgrade
> diskette sets and making new memory addressing PAL chips which sit on the
> daughterboard to enable the larger memory size to be addressed?
>
> Regards
> Rob
> The Emulator Archive

I'm not involved with the Route 66 upgrade, but I might be able to shed a
little light on things...
The PALs can be easily reverse-engineered.  Quite simple.  Pull the PALs
from a known good 8M Emax II, power them up on a test bench, then feed
inputs in and see what comes out.  That lets you make a function map, which
you then use to blow new PALs.
The EEPROM is trickier, because (apparently) it contains *all* the options
for a given instrument.  What I'd be inclined to do is just copy the EEPROM
from the 8M machine, and distribute it with the upgrade.  OK, you'd lose
your calibration, headroom settings etc.  Big wow. At least you'd have 8M to
play with...
Of course, the other thing would be to reverse-engineer the software, and
bypass the "protection" for the EEPROM editor in the Master section.  This
could be tricky, but there again, see http://groups.yahoo.com/miragehack for
a similar project...

HTH
  Gordon.



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