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

I've talked to two techs today (Bruce Forat, and some other guy in Hollywood)
and nothing is jumping out and grabbing them on what it could be.

But anything I load seems to be having the same kind of distortion or crackle.
Especially anything that i've setup with sustain or long decay.   But the C notes in
particular up and down the keyboard are worse.   

I have not opened up the unit yet.   I was thinking about selling the unit, but i'm
thinking of keeping this baby.   I'm picking up an EIII saturday, but i'm set on getting
this EII sorted.     Any tips?

Yes.

Open it, and carefully reseat and clean all its ICs (clean their pins).
Pain in the ass, but afterwards, your EII will be like new.

Actually, I tried my own samples, or made some of my own samples I should say.  No problems.  Crackling is gone.   Pooof!  went away.   So like 90% of the disks I got with the unit are old and corrupted data.    Now it's warm as can be.   I think I just need some new disks.

The only issue right now is the fact that I don't like the way the velocity works on the EII so far.  Is there a way to turn it completely off?  So I have full strike all the time?  I know all about the different timbres one can create with different velocities and all that, but right now I wish I could disable it for now. 

Anyways, i'm removing the for sale listing.  This thing is the bee's.

 8)

I think I figured out the velocity settings.  But now, there seems to be the issue of the EII running out polyphony sometimes.  All i'm doing is running one voice by the way.  A sampled chord stab off an FM synth.  I'm hitting one note on the EII in a row, and by the 5th or 6th single note strike I hear silence for that one note and then it comes back again immediately on the 7th key push.   And the sample is only 1 second long.   Does Dynamic Allocation assist me with this?  And also, when I put that voice in Solo mode the voice becomes 100% reliable.  What gives?  Is this like a priority mode 1,2,3 like the Akai's? 

It's got to be something i'm doing wrong at this point.  Any feedback anyone?

Very good. Indeed, it IS. Like nothing else (not even EIII or such - IMHO).

Concerning your 'new' issues:
Make a blank disk first (format it with the latest OS - 3.1). Do NOT save anything on it. Then power it up again, booting from that disk - so your EII is in initial state as it should be. Then again - take a sample of your choice. IF the machine doesn't play it back in 8 voice polyphony, there's something wrong (with the machine that isn't your fault).

Greetz,
Elm, who always believed in you, not wanting to sell that precious EII  ;) 8) 8)

Thanks bro, I really appreciate it.

I did what you said.  Now it's not fighting for polyphony with a reformatted disk.
It's playing and saving my samples like crazy.   Oh man!  This thing is tits!

Punchy, dark, warm.  Filter is wicked wicked.   No static or distortion.  It sounds brand new.   It's lovely.

Elm you rock bro,  thank you.  :D

Oh man, that's really nice to hear!!!!!!

Yeah, this machine just rocks. NOTHING has a sound alike. Not even ANY other E-Mu machine.
Have you experienced the OMI / Northstar library yet? I mean - via SoundDesigner on Macintosh and the EII cable?

Incredible...

BTW.: Are you a San Diego resident? I've been there last year and back in 2005, and it's definitely my favourite californian spot. I've just got my motorcycle drivers license, and I'm just dreaming about cruising through ocean beach. IF I'll ever (and I WILL) go on a motorbike trip there, we HAVE to hook up for a meeting man!

Greetz,
Elm.

Elm,

Yeah man, for sure.   I just sent you a PM.

I'm picking up that EIII tomorrow and I think I just scored an Emax rack
also. 

I am having the crackle sound as well on a few EII's i was suspecting the disk's being corrupted. I will do some tests to see if reformatting and re saving voices clears it. ill post my results.

So hear are my deductions so far.
Using the method described above will "fix" the problem or so it seems.
I ran the memory test and came up with about 15 to 16 chips with dead memory cells.
I changed them out and then i reloaded the piano sounds and had no clicking or noise on any key.
if i pull the piggy back board and boot i get crackling on mostly upper keys.
I think what is happening is the memory area is filled sequentially or alocated in a way that fills upper memory areas and if you have a bad cell you get distorted return output. This as i think is dependent on how the memory is allocated. when i reallocated sounds i got no crackling even with the piggy back board out. (probably due to it using only lower area of undamaged memory). This is all theory and i am unsure if i am totally correct hear so if anyone thinks they know more please i would love to hear.

How I used to do :

sample the full lenght of memory with an organ sound (or strings).
Play it and hear at what time the click occurs.

If its after the half of the total sample lenght, its on the piggyback

Swap two quarters of the piggyback memories.

sample the full lenght of memory with an organ sound (or strings).
Play it and hear at what time the click occurs.

sample the full lenght of memory with an organ sound (or strings).
Play it and hear at what time the click occurs.

If its the same, it means that the bad chip may be in the other half of the piggyback memory.

Take one of the quarters of the PREVIOUSLY TESTED memories (wich worked) and swap it with one of the quarter of memory wich is left on the piggyback.

Samùple again and listen

If its the same, it means that the faulty chip is on the last quarter.

It sems very basic, but if your machine has 65,536 memory chips, you find the faulty one after 16 tries.

hay Doc thats good. i did not realize that would work thanks!
Man i am lucky i have the memory disk
without the memory test disk it seems really hard to narrow them down.
When the test shows a failure it gives you the row of 8 its in and the data that failed so you can figure which one of 8 failed by the readout.
Anyway thanks for the info.

I wish i had a way of uploading the file. but to make a copy i have to do some juggling of the disk's
Has anyone tried to make a way to read the disks via PC or mac???

Be "carefull", it happened to me that the memory test didn't work, giving me a wrong row.

Copying on a Mac or PC is impossible. Many have tried that, but the floppy disk hardware and controllers are simply incompatible.

How does this memory test disk actually works ? Do you have to boot the EII with this disk, or can you load it in some way after a normal boot ? And once the disk is loaded, does it go back to that disk for loading other portions of its test program (just like normal OS operations on the EII) ?

The full active memory of the EII can be read out via the DB25 pin connector at the back of the EII, so this could be a way of copying the contents of the disk - on condition that the full memory test program is in RAM of course (which is not the case with the EII operating system for instance).
Anyway, this approach requires of course that the EII has the RS422 "client" software module loaded in some way or another.
So if the the EII boots from the memory test disk instead of a normal EII disk, and this RS422 software module is not part of that memory disk, then even reading out memory via RS422 is not possible.
Checking if the RS422 is active yes or no can be done by trying to put the EII under Mac control after the memory test disk has been loaded.
If that would be possible, then a copy could be taken with a PC connected to the EII.
The next question is then how this copy can be uploaded from PC to EII again, without overwriting crucial OS memory which can cause the EII to crash...
And finally we still have the problem that even no reliable RS422<-->PC device exists which supports the upload of data towards the EII via RS422.
...Oh well: it's pretty clear that the conclusion is that you probably can't copy the disks and upload them to the internet. The best you can do is make a hard copy on the EII itself (if supported) and physically ship them to us.

But the reasoning above made me think that it's probably quite easy to write a new memory test program.
As DrC explains, there's some logic in finding out which chip is the bad one.
And a normal asynchronous RS422/USB device in between the PC and EII is capable of reading all memory segments of the EII via the DB25 connector. If there's a bad chip, most probably reading a memory segment on that bad IC will cause an error or at least wrong data, so the memory test program running on the PC could calculate and report which IC is corrupt.

Maybe I'll try to make this, just for the fun of it  ;)

///E-Synthesist

   
 

I had a copier on Apple II wich copied ANYTHING.

I've got a friend who maybe still have it. I am supposed to see him soon.
I will ask

Aha.

So the Apple II is the way to go !
During the last years I was involved in some discussions which legacy systems were compatible with those EII floppy disks. Some said Apple II, others some CP/M box.

If I find an Apple II with some software supplied, I'll buy it !

Would there be a way to transfer files from Apple II to more modern machines  :D ?

///E-Synthesist

Absolutely. Let me check, but I think I have somewhere an A/D converter card for Apple II to sample music.

I used to change the EII Eproms (Main) to, instead of insert disk or "This will take a while", to display the owner's name.

It is possible, with an RS232 card, to connect it to the serial port of a PC, or even more viciously, put a modem, to modem.

Hi Esynth!

<<<
How does this memory test disk actually works ? Do you have to boot the EII with this disk, or can you load it in some way after a normal boot ? And once the disk is loaded, does it go back to that disk for loading other portions of its test program (just like normal OS operations on the EII) ?
>>>>

the test disk must be booted. and it only test the memory chips sequentially  it also boots to the lowest part of that memory so if a chip is bad in that area the boot hangs. there are two types of memory diskettes one for the HD type and one for the dual floppy's.

So as you summarized you cant use the rs244 to copy it.
the way i found to copy these disk's was to boot load a normal system disk. Then go into format and swap disks so i had a blank in drive two and the memory test disk in drive one. you can do this right when the display asks you to press yes to copy to drive two. then it loads from disk one and writes to disk two. and i get a copy of the system on the memory disk. this i discovered after much trial and error.
I can do this with the scanner test too. It also is a boot disk only and goes right into its test mode.
the scanner test will give you a way to test keyboard and all switches on the unit. they will light there respective LED'S and you can get a data readout on the display for all other switch's and key contacts.

Update on a possibly other cause for the clicking noise!

So i get another E11 in for service and it has a clicking noise in output!
But all the memory chips check out fine?

After much reading the service manuals section on theory of operation i realized the microcontroller section reads from ram and stores in a set of registers and outputs the sampled voice, so if anything is the miss in this section it could cause this problem as well, I came to the conclusion it was indeed in the microcontroller section!

I started to swap out every chip in this section one by one and came across the registers section and found one bad chip! a 74ls283 they are IC23 to IC27 on the digital board under the power supply. if it is one with the supply on the right hand side that is.

So it seems two possible places can cause this problem. One in the ram section and one in the micro controllers registers!

Hope this helps you wayward E11 owners out there!

Well done chaztech!!