E-mu Emulator Sampler User Forum for the EIII EII EI and EIII XP

whell im thinking about some cool ides for EMXP regarding EII

what gives me idea...I own PPG system with waveterm B and I can backup my disks into PC with some cool software disktools

software just make IMAGE of disk and disk is backuped

so that gives me idea to suggest other thing
IS it posible to directly convert SD4EII files into disk as image   ???

I have a pc with 5.25 drive ..so :)

another idea is it hard to adapt any PC based software like old wave editors or something to work with eII ???????


hmm just asking :)

D

When reading your post I was afraid that you were going to ask to add PPG support in one or another way  ;D

It is NOT possible to create or read 5.25 floppy disks for the EII. Not with a PC, nor with a Mac.
None of the specialized diskcopy tools and drivers support this, because the required hardware (controller) is simply not available in PCs and Macs. EII uses a non standard (non BIOS compliant) way of controlling its floppy drives. Some old Unix machines (or maybe even old Apples) from the early eighties supported this floppy format. Digidesign and Emu owned some of these machines to transfer disks to computer. When converting your OMI CD roms I noticed by the way that OMI must have had this possibility too, since their first volume seems to contain full floppy disk images instead of "just" memory dumps of the EII.
Anyway there may be a small possibility that using a specialized floppy controller in the PC instead of the default one can do the job. But there are only a few providers of such devices and they will have to custom-configure their chips in order to support the EII. As far as I know someone on the yahoo board was going to try this.
But if I were you I would forget about this wish.

Adapting software to support EII ?  One would need the source code and understand it, right  ;) So I wouldn't rely on this dream either...

Just FYI right now I'm investigating the possibility to use a PC instead of an old Mac to use the RS422 interface of the EII. I have the required hardware here (cables, RS422<->USB converters, ...) and also rough information on the communication protocol but until now my experiments were unsuccessful. Probably a problem with the voltage level or clocking differences between the EII interface and the standard RS422 ports (the Mac port was not 100% RS422 compliant and Emu relied on the Mac specs).
I need digital scopes and logic analyzers now to proceed but I don't have this equipment and I won't buy it either (too expensive).
The more interesting result of this experiment would be that I will also be able to let EMXP communicate with the RS422 on the Emax-I, making it possible to load/unload complete soundbanks to/from the Emax (no software, even old Mac software, is supporting this until now).

As you see, there are still quite a lot of challenges out there in Emu world.
I'm still doubting whether I will add SoundFont2 support to EMXP or not. The idea behind this was that it would "open" the Emu sample banks to any other sampler out there (and vice versa) since SoundFont2 is a widely supported soundformat. But I have a slight feeling that no one is really interested in this feature... SoundFont2 is a very generic dataformat which means it's quite complicated to support. It would take a huge amount of time to extend EMXP with SF2, so I won't do it if it's not useful or not high priority.

Any other suggestions for additional features in EMXP are welcome of course ! But don't ask for a graphical user interface.

ok GOD OF EMU  ;)

I understand

I also thought of that idea EMu 2 PC ... but man you know your JOB

o yes IS it posible to conver EMUII  sounds to PPG  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

that would be dream couse I own 2,3 with wavetherm and EVU :)

just asking stupid questions

Damir

 :D

Today I was playing once more with my experimental setup for trying to communicate with the EII from my Windows Vista machine.

And guess what ? I finally succeeded. Previous attempts failed due to an error in the Emu technical documents.
Oh my god, this means I can remove my old Mac computers from the studio in the near future. I'm definitely going to reverse engineer the EII communication protocol now, and if I succeed in that I'll certainly add RS422 communication support to EMXP (first for EII, later on also for Emax).
The EMXP communication features will be limited to unloading and loading banks of course...
...but maybe one day I (or someone else) will even create a VST plugin for the Emulator II  :P

FYI: Besides downloading the next version of EMXP, the only thing you'll need to do is buy an RS422<->USB converter with the capability to clock on 500 kHz (not all of them out there can do this, but some important brands have them in their catalogue). My device was priced about 80 EUR but there are cheaper ones available.

I'll let you guys know when I made some progress !

///E-Synthesist

Man every day you bring smile on my face

NEWS are awesome!!!!

any news on sp12 idea  ::)

A A A A A A H H H H H R R G H H H !!!

*speechless*

Is ist possible with the RS port of Rev.0 boards, too ?
(Cause I'm planning on modding the RS Port of my Rev.0 EII - which I think I wouldn't, if I could communicate with it anyway).

Greetz,
Elm.

At this moment: no.
I could investigate this but I would need a Rev.0 EII or adapt mine to become an original one again.
I'm not sure if the communication protocol used on RS422 was also the protocol used on the original RS232. I'm even not sure if Emu ever actually released communication facilities on the RS232 port.
If they did, it's probably just a matter of (a) making another cable,  (b) buying an (even cheaper) RS232<->USB converter and (c) having much more patience when transferring banks across the established serial line (about 2.5 minutes instead of 10 seconds).

///E-Synthesist

A A A A A A H H H H H R R G H H H !!!

Okay. I understand. So - I have no choice but modding that damn thing..

Have I?

I think you'll have to upgrade  ;)

But maybe I was too enthousiastic about my EII<-->Windows connection:
Until now this connection seems to be very unreliable, not to say almost unusable...
I'm still trying to find out why. If the PC sends the same instructions to the EII as the Mac does, it often gets an "error" (nack) back while the Mac gets an "ok" (ack).
You can imagine that this is quite a problem...
Receiving data or protocol bytes from the EII seems not to be a problem, the problem is located in the transmit part only.

I don't know what the cause of this problem is. Maybe electrical (voltage level), maybe timing (PC too fast or EII too slow, although both clocks are at 500 kHz...)

Mmmm... this will require more energy than I hoped for...  And I'm not a hardware specialist...

///E-Synthesist

With or whitout PC-EII connection EMXP is a absolutly fantastic programm, thx again for it!

I'm sure you'll get it done.
May the force be with you!

Greetz,
Elm!

you are awesome mate!

Small update:

I think I fully understand the protocol between the Mac and EII now, and I also succeeded in making a program that is able to unload banks from the EII to my Windows PC. So I'm pretty sure the opposite direction (loading banks from PC to EII) will be possible too...
...but there's a major drawback: at this moment the total communication time between the EII and the PC is too high, it certainly is too high to be acceptable for the average EII user.

The good thing is that I know what part of the communication is causing this delay. Moreover I also *think* that I know the fundamental cause of this, which is to be found in the hardware behaviour.

So I'm digging into that now and I hope I will be able to optimize the speed just by tuning the software.
If hope I will succeed; if I don't the only true solution will probably be to add a custom built hardware device, which I don't consider a feasible or acceptable solution since it can never compete with the cheap "Mac Classic" alternative.

///E-Synthesist

Hey!

Anyway good news no matter the drawback. You know who you are.

Wintermute was kind enough to give me his self-made prototype of the RS 232 -> 422 Interface.  (THANKS SO MUCH AGAIN!!!)
So I'm ready to upgrade my EII.

AND I BET YOU FIND A SOLUTION TO THE CUMMUNICATION PROBLEM FASTER THAN I'LL BE UPGRADING MY BABY   :D :D :D

Keep on the good work man!

Greetz,
Elm.

   That would be incredible.  Thank you so much for the work you have already done...  and may yet do!   :)

   Although I downloaded EMXP some time ago, I have just recently begun to use it and to realize the potential it offers me.  I will have to make a Paypal donation to you soon in thanks...

-Todd

Many thanks !

And indeed, there's more to come....
... Emulator-I is almost ready (next version)
... SP 12 is planned now too (future version)

Thank You for the EMXP, it is an absolutely brilliant tool!

How difficult would it be to implement a Sequential Prophet 2000/2002 support in EMXP with the possibility to convert EII/Emax to P2000/P2002, and vice versa?

WATZ

Well... it will definitely take some time  ;)

I once said that future versions of EMXP will have support for
- Korg DSS1
- Ensoniq Mirage
- Sequential P2000/2002
- Casio FZ1/10
- Oberheim DPX1
in next versions.

Mirage development was started a year ago put I have put it on hold once I could buy an Emulator-I.
You see: I'm giving priority to Emu equipment, so plans were changed and I started reverse engineering the Emulator-I. Now...a week ago an SP12 suddenly arrived in my studio, so... that will be the next unit to be supported by EMXP.

I do have the P2000 here, so I'm still hoping that I will be able to add it to EMXP too in the future.
From specification point of view, the above list of gear is "pretty" compatible with the old E-Mu stuff I have already added to EMXP.