Vintage Synth Repair

Okay, kids, this is kind of a weird one!

Last night I hooked my Korg Poly 800 to my computer via MIDI to play a
sequence.  All of a sudden, I lost all my patches.

I tried to reload via the tape port (this is the early Poly 800 with no
system exclusive features in the MIDI implementation), and it seemed to
work alright (I got the "GOOD" message after finished), but somehow the
patches never actually ended up in the memory!  I tried various
different banks of patches that I had saved as wav's on my computer, but
none of them actually ended up being playable on the synth!

I thought at first maybe the internal battery was dead, but then I
actually went into the parameters and created a patch from scratch, and
was able to save it just fine.  And it's still there, even after the
synth has been turned off.

Can anybody think of a reason that the Poly 800 would not store patches
send via tape to the patch memory, even though it acknowledges a
successful ("GOOD") load?!?  I certainly don't want to have to create 64
new patches from scratch...!

BaM

--
Find out more about Rocket Park at the (subliminal banana) home page!
http://www.rocketparkmusic.com/

Brian Andrew Marek wrote:

> Can anybody think of a reason that the Poly 800 would not store patches
> send via tape to the patch memory, even though it acknowledges a
> successful ("GOOD") load?!?  I certainly don't want to have to create 64
> new patches from scratch...!

Been a while since I've had a Poly 800 - did you remember to turn off the
memory protect before you tried loading?

Oh - and the thing with loosing patches while hooked up to MIDI - yep -
the problem is, Poly 800's don't know what to do with some 'noise'
conditions on the MIDI port - by 'noise' I mean powering up or down
your computer, or sometimes buffer over-runs - when it doesn't know what
to do, it'll wipe out memeory...

Later...

Bob

Bob Smith wrote:

> Brian Andrew Marek wrote:
>
> > Can anybody think of a reason that the Poly 800 would not store patches
> > send via tape to the patch memory, even though it acknowledges a
> > successful ("GOOD") load?!?  I certainly don't want to have to create 64
> > new patches from scratch...!
>
> Been a while since I've had a Poly 800 - did you remember to turn off the
> memory protect before you tried loading?

I'm assuming you're referring to the "enable/disable" switch by the tape
ports?  If there's any other form of memory protection, I'm not aware of it.
In any case, there's no way to get into the tape load mode without turning
that switch to enable, so that's not the problem...

BaM

--
Find out more about Rocket Park at the (subliminal banana) home page!
http://www.rocketparkmusic.com/

Brian Andrew Marek wrote:

> I'm assuming you're referring to the "enable/disable" switch by the tape
> ports?  If there's any other form of memory protection, I'm not aware of it.
> In any case, there's no way to get into the tape load mode without turning
> that switch to enable, so that's not the problem...

Maybe it was only on the Mark II - but I recall not only the tape
switch, but
a memory protect switch as well...

Later...

Bob

Bob Smith wrote:

> > I'm assuming you're referring to the "enable/disable" switch by the tape
> > ports?  If there's any other form of memory protection, I'm not aware of it.
> > In any case, there's no way to get into the tape load mode without turning
> > that switch to enable, so that's not the problem...
>
> Maybe it was only on the Mark II - but I recall not only the tape
> switch, but
> a memory protect switch as well...

Y'know, it sure does.  It's been a long time since I loaded anything from the tape
port, and I assumed that that switch was only used when editing a patch.  DUH!
Anyway, that made it work.  Thanks for pointing out what shoulda been obvious to
me... hehehe

BaM

--
Find out more about Rocket Park at the (subliminal banana) home page!
http://www.rocketparkmusic.com/

Brian Andrew Marek wrote:

> Y'know, it sure does.  It's been a long time since I loaded anything from the tape
> port, and I assumed that that switch was only used when editing a patch.  DUH!
> Anyway, that made it work.  Thanks for pointing out what shoulda been obvious to
> me... hehehe

cool - glad it wasn't anything serious!!

later...

bob