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

Hello all...

This is a repost of a new topic I raised on on the VSE website on request of the EIII forum owner:

Having done a ton of research on the subject of hardware floppy disk emulation, pursuading myself the potential product was unique and therefore I should develop one, and then only to find one already exists, the following may be of interest to some (including Emulator I/II/III owners....)

Much of the now cherished studio gear from the 80's and into the early 90's featured a floppy disk drive. Although these were all the rage 20 years ago it's becoming increasingly difficult to find 5.24" and DSDD 3.5" floppies not to mention good S/H replacement drives. Although one or two floppy disk emulators are emerging for use in home computers for the retro market, many are taylored for specific applications/formats, and most are in kit form eg. HxC.

I have recently tracked down a new product range, currently not distributed outside of China, which fully hardware emulates a Shugart compatible drive and permits several virtual floppies images to reside on one memory stick. The product is unique in that it emulates the disk at a very low level thus making the data format irrelevent. As long as the unit has been spec'd for the correct density, and set for the right drive ID it should theoretically work. The unit has the same dimensions as a 3.5" floppy drive which means it should also fit in a 3.5" to 5.24" drive bay converter for use in older gear such as the Emulator II. The front panel simply features a memory stick socket and a two digit LED display permitting the user to select the virtual floppy of his choice. This means you should have the equivalent of several boxes of floppy disks residing in the space once taken up by your floppy drive!

This product has some very interesting potential as, in theory, it means for the first time users of the increasingly classic popular 8 and 12 bit samplers not featuring hard drives will have a convenient, cheap and faster method of moving data between their samplers and their pcs. This could suddenly open up the opportunity for classic sampler users to share their samples on the internet in a standard form. What is not clear at this stage is whether a PC app similar to EMXP will be required to manage the data on the memory stick or whether it's in FAT32 format.

The product should work with a whole variety of other studio gear too. I have put a quick list together of the kit I think could potentially be transformed by variants of this product:

Native Shugart compatible DD/HD 3.5" 34 pin Floppy Drive Sampler Applications:

SCI Prophet 2000 & 2002*
Ensoniq Mirage
E-mu EMAX I & II*
AKAI S900, S950 & S1000*
Casio FZ1
Roland S-330, S-550 & S50

Atari ST
Alesis Datadisk*
Korg 01/WFD

Shugart signal compatible 3.5" Applications requiring 34 pin to 26 pin ribbon adaptor:

Yamaha SY77, SY85 & SY99*
Yamaha DX7IIFD*
Yamaha V50*

Shugart 5.25" Applications requiring drive bay converter and edge connector adaptor:

E-mu EII
Fairlight CMI Series I/II with some possible tweaks to the emulator firmware.

I am currently liasing with the supplier to obtain some samples for evaluation. These products were originally developed for industrial applications such as knitting machines and machine tools where the initial cost of investment was high and therefore means to extend equipment life highly advantageous. Although this is definitely not the case for old pcs it's also very true of vintage studio gear.

I am hoping to blog the progress of this evaluation work in order to determine which kit can be successfully adapted and what, if any, adaptors/cables/options are required.

* denotes applications I can evaluate without the loan of hardware.

Once I've established that the product does what I think it should do I'm hoping that I might find some tech savvy Emulator and Fairlight owners that might be able to help me determine whether we can adapt these beasts and in due course help to provide a simple to install upgrade kit.

Hi!

That sounds very interesting, though I have some serious doubts that it will function properly...

My doubts specifically concern a Floppy Emulation for the Emulator II (which is my favourite anyway :):

The EII is the ONLY device which can WRITE EII - floppies. There is the Oberheim DPX-1 which is the only device (besides the EII) that can READ EII - floppies.


The only other EII-dedicated data format is the *.EII file format (Sound Designer). This format is recognized by modern PCs (EMXP) as well as vintage Macintoshs. BUT NOT DIRECTLY by the EII :)   

Let's hope that all thuis will function anyway...   ::)

(don't think so though...)

Greetz,
Elm.

Hi Elm,

                I'm not sure your seeing what this devices does.  The device emulates the Shugart drive mechanism itself in a transparent manner - ie. it very low level emulates a virtual head reading any old virtual data from a virtual disk.  The EII is fitted with a perfectly normal 80 track constant angular velocity double density Shugart compatible drive and therefore I see no reason why it won't work.  The only devices I suspect will cause an issue are hard sectored 8 inch disks or old Mac style constant velocity drives applications - I'm not sure if the Fairlight, for example, used Hard Sectored 8" disks.  The device runs raw and therefore doesn't need to understand the disk format as in a typical PC disk reader/conversion utility - it mearly records and plays back raw data from a virtual head mechanism.

Hi!

Hm, okay - so this drive emulator can be installed instead of for example the lower disk drive of the EII?
But still: How could I store SEVERAL disk "images" (or banks) on ONE memory stick and then tell the EII which of those images to load (as a physical EII floppy disk can only hold ONE bank)?!

(Maybe I'm still getting all this wrong?  ::) ??? ::)

If so, excuse me, I'm not a tech guy  ;)

Hi guys,

this sounds very interesting.
I was able to modify regular floppy drives for the usage with the EII so I think it is possible to use a low level emulator too.
I was also searching for a floppy disk emulator since I think using floppy drives for the EII is just a temporary solution. It will only take some time until all floppy drives have disapeared from the selves of the computer stores (especially the ones without USB).

Since the HxC projekt mainly focuses on the AMIGA, is not standalone and unable to write to disk images this is not an option yet.
There are a few other manufactures who claim that they are able to replace a Shugart floppy drive with a memory card based solution. Examples are here http://www.datexdsm.com/emulator/docs/DTX200en.html and http://www.cscheidl.de/Projekte.html .

But as you said, they mainly focus on the industrial sector rather than consumers as we are. So I had no luck with them until now. If you really manage to get a Floppy emulator device that actually works you can count me in. It will be a pleasure for me to try that out on my EII.

Another question is the price that such a device will cost...did you see any pricetag yet?

cheers
wintermute

This sounds all very interesting.

And if this device actually works on the EII, I promise that I will adapt EMXP so that it understands the floppy disk images on these memory card as well !
That will be a very easy thing to do. But it has to be done since the EII floppy disk images are not exactly the same as the SDII (.EII) images used by Sound Designer. The reason for this is that the EII disk also contains the operating system.
Mmm... this also means we will have access to the binary code of the EII operating system. Very interesting indeed !

Keep in touch.

///E-Synthesist

things keep rollin...  8)

I just called a German manufacturer of o similar device that is described here. The emulator handles 99 Images of one SD-Card.
They will send me the technical docs and I might be able to testdrive the device for 2 weeks if I am really interested.

Although the price he stated is far beyond being acceptable for one device he is willing to discuss if we order in bulks.

So my question to the group is:
- What price would be acceptable for such a device
- @esynthesist If I testdrive the device would it help the developement of EMXP if I am able to dump the EII OS?
- is it possible to decomplie the OS if we have a binary dump?
- is the other device capable of the same features and is it lower in price?

...to be continued :)

Don't know what I would be willing to pay...
how much does that manufacturer want for it?

Almost the price a EII will cost you  ::)

 :o :o :o :o

huiuiui

Those guys are nuts!
Hmmmmmm  ??? :-[ :-\ :'(

I received the pinout...
since I dont have the EII pinout here maybe someone could verify it matches the EII?

(http://www.robotsinmotion.com/floppypinout.JPG)

edit: oops..just realized that I posted the wrong picture...sorry

Very interesting topic here...

Belong the fact, that a old mac with SD works very fine, the price for a working CF-Reader should not be higher than 50-100€!

A reverse engineering OS-hack seems to be more interesting :)

Hi Guys,

                       In answer to all of your questions.....

I have just received the technical manual for this product and it's exactly what I was hoping it to be - it even supports disk change line options.

The reason why this product is very interesting for me is that it's both a very low level emulator and surprisingly cheap!   Initial quotes are around 80 dollars - much cheaper than anything else commercial I've seen.

The drive is very clever in that it features a 2 digit LED display to allow the user to select 1 of up to 100 virtual floppies.  All you have to do is make a catalog of what you stored on each virtual disk.  What I am really hoping to do is to persuade the company that they should produce a version with an OLED display to permit the user to label his virtual disks in text!

I have just received an email from the company that produces the device in China and they promise me that some are already being used in musical instruments.  I am currently liasing with them in order to ship a sample of each format variant.

As our hero esynthesist has offered - it would be really cool it we went one stage further and supported the manipulation of the disk images the product creates on the memory stick.  Until I evaluate the drives I won't know whether this is feasible.

As one has suggested - since the EII has two drive bays it should be possible to set the ID of the virtual drive to permit the sampler to read disks and copy their contents to the virtual drive - this is a luxary that owners of other sampler models wont have and it's a bit of a headache for me at the moment.

If this works this is the closest chance we have of immortalising the EI/EII & EII as well as EMAX I & II as, as long as we all agree to a standard image format, our samples (possibly including the official ones with permission) will be in a modern format that we can share and post on the internet.  :)

Since I'm a huge fan of vintage studio gear I'm hoping to make similar upgrade paths for all of the major synths and samplers of the time.

I'm also interested in affordable silent running solid state SCSI HD options - but this is another story :)

Many Thanks for all of your interest.... keep posting your questions/ideas.....

Dan.
Hideaway Studio
http://www.last.fm/music/D.A.Wilson

So it all gets even more interesting :-)

@Wintermute: the dump of the OS will not help the development of EMXP dramatically, but it surely is something very interesting for binary hackers ! So once you have a test device, please make a raw image  of the memory card in one way ore another on your PC/Mac. This image will be a good starting point for further reverse engineering. The main advantage for EMXP would be that we will finally be able to create an "EII bootable" disk on a PC... for those people who buy an EII without any disk supplied with it.

@HideawayStudios: I hope the memory stick will have a normal FAT layout containing several 560K files, each containing the EII OS + sound bank. The question is how this device is dividing one memory card into several emulated floppy disks. Does it hold a small OS which performs this formatting ? We'll only be sure once you're testdriving it. Anyway, even if the card will "not be recognized" by your PC/Mac, this doesn't mean we will not be able to read/write the images on the card. Because the same is true for e.g. EIII CD-ROMs. If that's the case it's just a matter of analysing the raw disk layout created by that memory card device. And if we are lucky, the vendor will even provide us with this (low technical) information !

@both: I like a price tag of 80 euro more than the price tag of my EIIs. Well, at least at the price I bought them (500-700 euro) :-). I would be surprised that the german manufacturer will lower its price to the chinese level, but still it's interesting to continue talking with them & testing their device.

If these companies realize that their device can be used in all of this vintage music & computer hardware, they may be interested in the consumer market & lowering their prices.

If bulk orders must be placed, please let us now on this (and other) group forums !

///E-Synthesist

The German supplier was already signaling that we can discuss the price. But the 80$ will not be possible for sure. Lets check the features of the devices. Since the device features Disc Ready signals...I am optimistic that it could really work. Need to check if DS0 and DS1 is possible as well.

While researching on the topic today I found another device using USB sticks as well. I am really curious if one of them works. Need to try them both :)

Hi - yes - according the the manual for the Chinese product the drive supports the full 4 drive IDs and the change line config.

Dan.

OMFG!

Imagine an EII with an OLED display device in the lower drivebay!!!  :P :P :P
Two digit LED though would maybe even be cooler!

Hah, this all sounds brilliant! cannot wait for the results of your 'testdrive'...

Are we only talking about memory sticks? or is this floppy emulator also available as a flash card reader?

From what I understand is that Dan's emulator is USB-Stick based. One emulator I found is also USB-Stick based the other uses CF-memory cards.

As one stick can hold 99 banks, I guess it would be most practical to have a usb-flash-card adapter-stick which can be loaded with several flash cards (each with 50 MB capacity).

I just got the info that you can jumper the floppy emulator to work as DS0 or DS1. That means you can replace the first and the second floppy drive of the EII. Seems like that thing could actually work in the EII.

...keep you updated.

nice!!!

I've just had a quote for one sample of each variant.   I will place the order asap.

I've been reading up on the 8" drives used in the Fairlight today - it is possible to convert between the 34 pin and 50 pin Shugart interfaces so it's just possible Fairlight owners might be able to benefit from this one too.

 

Hi Dan,

sounds cool!
I also phoned to the distributor today and I will be able to test the floppy emulator for the next 2 weeks. :)
I also got another quote for the USB Stick device and the price it unbelieveable.
I suspect these devices to be the same as the chinese provider offers. If so the price is a little impolite.

If I am lucky I will be able to dump the EII OS this week end or beginning of next week.  :D

woooow so many good news

I like this all the way

I'm not sure just how feasible this is without a translator program as it's unlikely the data will be stored in a completely raw and contiguous form on the USB stick - in other words the data off the memory stick is unlikely to directly usable as a dump of EOS.  Please also bare in mind that it's only a binary anyway so you'd have completely dissassemble it to make any use of it other than simply copying it to another disk.

I wonder if the boot code used to boot via floppy on the Emulators is exactly the same as the binary on the hard disks?

The floppy emulator I will be testing is the CF-Card version. The device includes a Windows tool to dump the data of the CF-card. So if I can write an image to the card I will be able to transfer the image to my PC. Of cause you only get binary data but thats a first step.

... complete silence from floppy emulator world  ??  ;)
... any success or progress yet guys ??

+1     ::) :P

Hi,

I had no chance to try the emulator yet.
I have been at a customer the whole week so if I am lucky and the post office kept the parcel I can try the floppy emulator this week-end.

Dont worry...I will try it for sure!
I Swear ;)

Hello - It's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to arrange a bank transfer to the supplier in China.  I am now waiting for 4 samples.  Don't worry - I will post the results just as soon as I can.

Cheers,

Dan.

OK guys, we keep our excitement stand-by  ;D
Hope to hear good news from you soon.

NEWs!

...unfortunately no good news.

The EII recognized the floppy emulator but I was unable to write on the CF card.
Formating, copying does not work (disc not ready). I made sure the ready signal is present on PIN34...still no luck. I was able to setup the device to work as FD1 or 2 and the EII could access the device but not read or write from it. I am sure that if you modify the firmware it is possible to use an floppy emulator but I doubt that any company will put effort in developing or modifing the firmware for this application. Does anyone know details about the disc format of the EII?
Maybe I can ask the developer if they can modify the firmware accordingly.
esynthesist?

Hmmm... no good news indeed.

I'm wondering what disklayouts *have been* programmed in their firmware. E.g. would the device work with an Emax-I ? With a Korg DSS-1 ? With a Casio FZ-1 ? (ok, I admit I own these babies...)

Unfortunately no one knows about the actual diskformat of the EII anymore. Even Rob of the Emulatorarchive doesn't know. I guess we could e-mail the designers of that machine but since Rob is still in contact with them, I assume that they don't remember anymore OR that they don't want to be bothered anymore with these annoying questions  :)

BUT at least there's a "hint" in the service manual.
My best guess is that the disk has no sectors within its tracks. This means that the sectorsize equals the tracksize. Now the EII disks have 80 tracks of 3584 bytes on each side, so this means 2*80*3584 bytes on a disk. Yes: the EII is able to store 560K of bytes (573440 bytes) on those good old 360K dos disks  :o

But to be honest I don't believe that there are no sectors in these 3584 byte tracks. I tried however to detect them with sectorsizes of 128, 256, 512(, 1024) on an eighties DOS machine equipped with a 360K 5.25 drive and the old OmniDisk program, but without any success. Unfortunately no other sectorsizes than these 3 can be tested on PCs because the BIOS/Floppy controllers simply don't support them. So I also can't check if the sectorsize is actually 3584.

Damned, this lack of information is frustrating.
I will contact Rob and ask him if he still can get into contact with Dave Rossum or Dana Massie. They designed the EII... if I would have designed it, I would still know this kind of choices I made in the design, even after 25 years. Fingers crossed, let's hope they can respond.
And then... let's hope the device's engineers want to update their firmware...

///E-Synthesist

I have no idea if other synths with discdrives are working. The only other devices I have here with floppy are the S2000 and the DPX-1. Maybe I could try the DPX but I think there is no real point in doing so. I think the EII is the most interesting device to get a floppy emulator for (along with the PPG and the Fairlight). I still have some 3.5" drives as spare but I want a permanent solution. The discs I am using are old Amiga floppys...I have no idea how long they will work. A few years ago I never wanted to buy a floppy based synth! Now I remember why I never wanted to do that :) but the EII is such a great device...we need to save it!!!

Lets start a petition!

Edit: What I will try is to send the developers a floppy disc with the EII OS and ask them if they know how the floppy is organized.

I'm hoping my experiences with the solution I sourced from China are a little more positive as it's clearly a different beast.   The device is not supposed to have any predisposition about formats so as long as the physical connection is correct it should work  (or so I'm told).

It's a long wait...  I have been assured that some of these devices are working in vintage studio gear.

Fingers Crossed....

Dan.

+1

SAVE THE EII ! .............

 :D

The developer answered and told me that if I send him the EII discs he will examine them for us.
I will prepare 2 floppies for him and we'll see if he finds out something more specific.
I am really surprised by that offer and I am really curious if he finds something out.
If he knows how to the sectors are organized he can modify the firmware.

He told me that the firmware only supports 512 bytes/sector.

@esynthesist
could you list some facts that you know for sure about the floppy format and disc drives?
At what speed do they spin?
What software did you try to read the disks? So I can tell him that certain programs are useless to try.

Still exiting!

There are really not  a lot of details known about the physical EII disk layout.

The only information mentioned in the service manual is:
- "there are 0x00 to 0x9E tracks on a disk". Translation: there are 160 tracks on a disk and we can assume that this means 2 sides of 80 tracks because 160 tracks on one side is impossible on those 5.25 disks.
- "there are 0x0E00 bytes in each track". Translation: there are 3584 bytes in each track. This equals 7 times 512 or 14 times 256 or 1 time 3584 bytes... So if the sectorsize would be 512 bytes, there would be 7 sectors per track. But again: this kind of information on sectorsizes is not provided, nor are the gapsizes being explained etc.
- "burst time is between 0x60 and 0x70": Translation: burst time is between 96 and 112 (don't know the unit)
That's all. I don't even know the spinning speed.

I tried to find out the lowel level physical disk layout using the OmniDisk software on an old DOS PC containing a 5.25 drive. OmniDisk is the predecessor of the WinXP software OmniFlop (see www.omniflop.com). I tried several manual settings, as well as the autoscan mode of OmniDisk. Without any success. After contacting the guy who wrote OmniDisk, I learned that most probably the EII does not use a sectorsize or a drive spin speed which is supported by a PC floppy controller. And if the controller doesn't support it, the software can not detect the disk layout of course... 

I also received an answer from Rob of the emulator-archive. He says none of the EII design team members remembers these details anymore and the design documents which could explain our problem have been lost.
One thing we could do is monitoring the EII Shugart interface pins while the EII is formatting/reading/writing a disk. But this requires a logic analyzer which I don't have. Maybe some pins can be read with a high speed serial link to a PC and a small terminal program instead of an L.A.... But I doubt about the success ratio of any of these experiments.

So I really hope that the device Dan will test is more generic and doesn't need this low level EII disk information. That would be the easiest way to continue this project  :)


///E-Synthesist

 I hope so too but I also hope to find out more details about the floppy format. I still wonder if the USB stick device is fast enought for this application. We will see :)!

? What do you mean ?
The floppy drive/bus needs 25 seconds to read/write only 0.5 MB.
I think any USB bus or device can handle much higher transfer speeds than a floppy based dataflow...
Or do you mean something else ?

err???  Yes - you've completely lost me too.  Shugart runs up to 500Kbits/sec raw MFM data ie. a max of 50Kbytes a second (in bursts).   Even a USB 1.0 memory stick is capable of 150Kbytes/s - enough for at least a 2X oversample on a raw data capture.  I would expect there to be some buffer memory anyway ie.  I doubt it uses the memory stick as scratch space - it's more likely to use SRAM for that - surely?   When I get the drives I will let those who are interested what it's guts consist of (although I have a sneaking suspicion that it consists of one ASIC).

It is almost totally unlikely the drives in the EII were non standard - it simply would not have made commercial sense and I know the drives in the EMAX family were standard computer drives of the time.  What is possibly more likely is that the EIIs floppy disk format was very simplistic - this certainly was the case for E-mu's scsi formats of that era.  This could make reading an EII disk in a PC very difficult.  As I keep saying I'm really hoping this product doesn't have any preconceptions about format ie. it simply oversamples raw MFM data in a virtual array of tracks in memory - this is exactly how I intended to design such a product.  The issue with this method is it's rather inefficient on memory as the oversampling process could waste up to 8 times as much memory as the "real" data - what it should guarantee though is that the system should run with a much wider range of embedded gear.

This is possible because there is no intelligence whatsoever in the Shugart compatible floppy mechasms - this is purely the job of the controller at the other end of the Shugart interface.  All the drive does is lay down MFM data raw on a magnetic media on the track stepped to (relative, not absolute - hence the need for continual resets to track 0) and synchronised to a hub reference where the drive is the master sync to the controller.  The data itself is serially loaded/unloaded to/from the controller.  One interesting aspect about this method of recording (CAV) is that the data density has to be higher on the inner tracks with a smaller diameter which is where you'd expect to see more data errors.

On the other hand the job of emulating a disk in a comuter emulator such as UAE is quite complex as the system calls are made to a virtual disk controller (not a drive) which in turn is managing virtual disk images.  In our case the drive emulator is only mimicing the drive mechanism ie. the H/W floppy controller is still very much in tact on the sampler's motherboard.

Its just that I heard of USB based floppy emulators that write directly to the stick without buffering the data. I also realised that the boot process of the device takes "long". I dont know if this could affect the operation of the floppy emulator in the EII...but it could be a possible error (maybe).

Anyhow I send back the floppy emulator and included 2 disc with the EII OS on it. Maybe the developer can tell us more details about the layout of the floppy disc.

Hi guys,

the developer answered and he told me that he was unable to read the disks with  any of his tools. Maybe he will try again since I told him to keep the disks I sent him.
But all in all it seems that Emu did the best copy-protection ever :).

Still hoping that the china device will do the job.

Cheers
Wintermute

 :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

somehow I knew...

Sorry about the delay....   As I half suspected and others rather cynically thought, the devices from China appear to be optimised for DOS based formats only.  This annoys me as this is not how the drives were described to me!  In fact this little "experiment" cost me a small fortune  ::)

I obtained samples of the 3.5HD and DD drives as well as a 5.25DD.  I tried the drives in several pieces of equipment including the Prophet 2002 sampler, the EMAX II and EIII and Alesis Datadisk.  Sadly the drives didn't work in any of them!

What actually proved my suspicions in the end was connecting the drive to an old Archimedes computer.   When attempting to format a disk in native ADFS mode it just didn't work but when I formatted a disk in DOS mode it did... slowly!
 
Taking the drives apart I suspect the emulation is just too slow and inflexible.

Before you all slit your wrists....   Having read up on exactly how the Shugart interface works I am still absolutely convinced that a solid state flopy drive could be designed for the EII.   As I've said before the key is totally ignore the EIIs format and simply oversample the data in each track just as a logic analyser would.  With the use of a small FPGA, an STM32 and some SRAM this would be possible and relatively inexpensive.

There have been many interested in this concept for both the Emulators and the Fairlight.

There wouldn't be too much issue me designing the hardware right up to a production worthy device but I'm not up to writing the firmware and FPGA code.

Sadly the biggest issue is that since I do this kind of design work for a living I've got precious little time outside of work for concocting such a thing.

Maybe one day!

I'm sorry to get all of your hopes up with this device - as I said please don't give up on the idea entirely.  Although it may seem a long way off you must remember that the level of technology required to achieve this task is pretty mundane by todays standards - hell if you can emulate an entire Amiga in an FPGA you CAN emulate a floppy drive in one too!  ;D

That's bad news.

I'm wondering why these companies don't make that kind of universal device you're describing ? One would think that making it DOS-only would take more effort from them than simply making a lower level piece of hardware.

It seems like most hardware projects announced during the last months all kind of "fail" or "get into trouble". Remember the idea to make a synchronous RS422 device for PCs... ? It seems like those projects are also not very successful.
If I would know more about hardware, I would give it a (unsuccessful ?) try myself, but I'm not (yet).

Anyway, many thanks for the effort and investments you made !

///E-Synthesist

That's right. Thank you for your efforts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for that - Like I said I'm really sorry to get all of your hopes up.   After a bit of thought I have decided to further investigate the idea of designing some custom hardware from scratch.  I will keep you posted.

i try to contact the china team that sell this product and ask their support...
from what i understand that product doesn't support the RY34, the ready signal on pin 34... that should be the matter cause they doesn't wotk...
i would like to try them with emu sp1200 and akai mpc 60.... but both ask the signal ready on pin 34....

my 2 cents

You might want to follow my new thread:

http://eiiiforum.com/index.php?topic=216.0

I'm starting development of my own product which is far more likely to work in all Shugart applications - including EII.

This seems very promising. It should work with the Fairlight Series II. But given all the other gear it support it might be a solution for the EII. Attention, it is french.

http://jeanfrancoisdelnero.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html

Here's the Google translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeanfrancoisdelnero.free.fr%2Ffloppy_drive_emulator%2Findex.html&sl=fr&tl=en

This time there is actually a picture of somme musical hardware working with this stuff

The HxCFloppyEmulator on Korg DSS-1!!!!

Now that is promising.

Where? Who? What??   :o   When?  ?   ?

Hi Elmbeatz,

See the link above in my previous posting.

Mmm... I have that HxC thing here for my DSS1.
Never tried it though, it's still in the box. But now I see that the firmware also supports write activity - mine is an older read-only version. And replacing the firmware seems to be a thing for hardware freaks...

This HxC project is a great initiative but I'm following it for some time now and it seems to me that progress is pretty slow, especially regarding the stand-alone version.

///E-Synthesist

That's where hideaway steps in, no?

Yes he is ! He's playing with multiple ideas at this moment for the Emu. Most probably he'll post an update on his activities soon  ;)
I'm not sure though if other samplers like the DSS are (still) part of his objectives.

I just found this (don't know if you have already seen it):

http://www.ipcas.com/products/usb-floppy-emulator-fdd-to-udd.html (http://www.ipcas.com/products/usb-floppy-emulator-fdd-to-udd.html)

Well... the pricetag says no, no, no,nooooooo.....  :(
Press the 'shop' link on that site to see the price.

//Escobar

wow that would be great if it works.

Well... it's German and it costs a lot.
Most probably this is the device Wintermute has been testing without any success, right Wintermute ???

///E-Synthesist

Thats not the device I tested...but my guess is that this device is the same hideaway ordered in China. The functions and specs are pretty similar. The main purpose of these floppy emulator devices is just to replace old floppy drives that have been used for business purpose. Since most of the companies used DOS for the last 25 years or so DOS (and most applications are based on DOS) this is the main system to be supported.

HxC looks like the most promising device to me at the moment...althought the USB-PC connection thingy is not an option for me. I hope the developement of the standalone version will advance soon. We shoud try to get in contact with the developer.

Hi,

have you seen the Uniflash?

http://www.2av.com.ua/indexe.htm
http://www.sequencer.de/blog/?p=730
http://home.arcor.de/hdm-world/ensoniq%20ts%20serie_de.htm

It looks like it works with Korg, Yamaha, Roland, Ensoniq products.

I guess that's what we're looking for more or less...

alright so i'm sure there is some reason why this won't work with the e2... go ahead dash all our hopes and dreams  :(

Hello all....   Having owned an EII+ for several weeks and pulled it apart along with reading the service manual I'm starting to see why the EII is a particularly difficult disk format to read in a modern PC.  The problem is that rather unusually the EII does NOT have a disk controller - it's floppy disk support is carried out by a bunch of off the shelf discrete ICs and some clever firmware.   Most devices designed in the 80s and 90s used disk controllers such as the Intel 8271 and the WD1770 and WD1772 - these generally lead to similar low level formats.  Unfortunately since the EII's format is purely determined in firmware via a PIO and CTC it's unlikely to be similar to either of these.

There is just a chance that HxC could be coded to work with these disks but it's not entirely likely.

This is why I still intend to plough on with my EMXfer project giving us all USB sample transfer via the "Computer Interface" for Windows in Sound Designer format for EII via EMXP.   This interface runs at 50Kbytes / second and hence will be much quicker than midi sample dump.  The project is still underway but progress has slowed a little.  The first revision of the hardware has been designed but needs to be manufactured and then some firmware written.

The good news is that it's looking increasingly possible we will be granted permission to distribute a large chunk of the official sample libraries (ie. factory and OMI disks 1&2 but not currently disk #3) in SD format.

I really hope to have a production ready interface available by the end of the year.  :)

 :o :o :o :o :o :o :o

Any updates on this?  I am very interested!

As a revision one owner I'm really looking forward to your developments,
and I enjoyed your Novachord video on youtube ! That thing sounds haunting !