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

I am pleased to announce that the first EII disk has been dumped successfully by the KryoFlux team! Finally EII can be brought back to this millenium!  :D

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* P A R T Y *

(oh my god  :P)

Big news indeed !!!
I hope to receive my HxCs soon, pre-order has been placed  :P

Yes, I'm wondering about that too.
While the HxC is a fantastic device, I think the physical design is currently a problem. OK, they say that the buttons and display can be removed and installed in a frontpanel of some case/diskdrive replacement kit, and this will indeed be possible for the EII due to the big size of the original 5.25 slots.
But for replacing 3.5 drives, I think they made a design error, especially by putting the SD card slot in the middle of the board.
Anyway, it should be a next (commercial) step of theirs to offer this kit readily built into one of three replacement kits:
- small 3.5 slot (later versions)
- big 3.5 slot (old versions, like the ones used in Emax)
- 5.25 slot
For now, this will be up to us I guess...
...although Wintermute already promised to try to find a solution  ;)

.

Hi,

I think we have a little misunderstanding here...

You are basically talking about two separate devices:

1. KryoFlux, made by us, The Software Preservation Socitety (Softpres), used to dump alien disk formats from floppy media.

http://www.kryoflux.com (http://www.kryoflux.com)
http://www.softpres.org (http://www.softpres.org)

2. The HxC floppy emulator, made by Jean-Francois Del Nero, used to emulate disk data to a real device like a computer or a musical instrument.

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/ (http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/)


All reverse engineering was done by IFW from Softpres and we now have the first dump ever made (OS 3.1 system disk) at hand. It's now up to JF to implement this new format into HxC to emulate.

To dump and then again use your own disks you would need both devices. If you just want to go for the data, you only need the first. If you just intend to use ready-made stuff, you only need the latter.

Mmm... so suppose we want to use SD cards in our Emulator II, and we want to use both the SAVE and LOAD functions of the Emulator II: are you saying this will not be possible ?

So:
- the HxC solution from JF can be used to:
  * write floppy images from a PC/Mac to an SD card
  * LOAD these floppy images from SD card into the Emulator II (with the HxC device replacing an old 5.25 drive)
  --> it's a device to be installed in old equipment which replaces the original floppy drive
- the Kryoflux solution from you can be used to:
  * connect an old 5.25 drive to the Kryoflux device, which is connected to a PC/Mac via USB
  * write the contents of that floppy to a floppy image file on the PC/Mac (which then can be saved to an SD card for use with the HxC...)
  --> it's a device to be installed in/connected to a modern PC, to which the original floppy drive of the old equipment can be connected (so it's a very advanced floppy controller). From then on, the PC can access the old floppy disks directly.

Is this a correct understanding ?

What is still unclear:
- can the HxC solution from JF can be used to SAVE data in the Emulator II to an SD card in the HxC device

Thanks for this great accomplishment: the first EII disk dump ever made !

What I said was that to dump E2 disks in the first place, you will need a device capable of reading the disks. This is KryoFlux. It uses a cheap standard 3.5" or 5.25" floppy drive you can get for a few bucks from eBay. You do NOT need to tear apart your old hardware and rip the drives from it.

As for the rest, you are perfectly right.
I assume that HxC can do both, read and write to SD card, but JF needs to confirm this.

Great.

This means that we have two options: either use the PC to read/write our EII disks, or use an SD replacement kit (HxC) in the EII to read/write EII SD cards.
(write support for both solutions are to be confirmed or are expected in the near future...)

Vintage people will like the Kryoflux solution (EII remains intact); the other ones the HxC solution (EII has to be adapted).

I like both, I have two EIIs, so I will buy both  ;D

Just to make sure: To get any data off any EII disk you will need a KryoFlux device, after that, you can proceeed with using HxC to read and write data with the original device.

E-Synthesist - that's exactly what I just thought !!!   ;D :D :D

* continuing P A R T Y *

Here's more detail:

http://www.softpres.org/news:2010-10-10

(Tried to upload the images here, but the folder here is full *erm)

About 26 years after the debut of the most popular sampler of the 1980s Softpres specialist István Fábián uncoveres the details of the disk format used by the Emulator II. Used by artists and bands like Jean-Michel Jarre, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Vangelis and Enigma, the very distinct sound of the machine became a common ingredient for many hit singles until the early 90s. One major reason for the unique character of the Emulator II was the compander mechanism used to overcome the quantization artifacts introduced by sampling in 8 bits depth only.

Now, for the first time ever, and with the help of KryoFlux, it is possible to fully ingest and preserve the data present on disks written with this very unique device. The disk format produced by the Emulator II OS is completely - and possibly deliberately - incompatible with any other known disk controller hardware at various levels, including bitcell width, marks, gaps, data and CRC encoding. As such, generic PC floppy disk controllers can’t read or write Emulator II disks at all.

To study the format generated by the machine, Softpres’ custom USB floppy controller KryoFlux and a standard 5.25” HD disk drive were used to create high definition stream files which were then further inspected with additional software tools developed by Softpres and by reverse-engineering and fully documenting the system ROM of the sampler device. Because of this, it’s not only possible to ingest disks, but also verify their contents and make sure that data stored is valid free of errors. This even works for data stored with third-party 3.5“ disk drives.

KryoFlux stream files hold all the necessary flux transition information present on a disk’s surface to completely archive the original content if required and can always be used to verify the integrity of an Emulator II disk dumped, or re-create a sector dump. Now musicians and producers get a chance to recover their data directly from their disks and regain access to their unique sounds, made two decades ago.

The disk format used by Emu II is not flexible, variable or protected; storing a sector dump is enough to reproduce a fully working Emulator II disk - as long as the sector dump is known to contain only sectors reported by KryoFlux as good. Alternatively, original disks can be stored and preserved using a Softpres IPF. Integrity checks and the separation of content and context make sure that disks preserved this way are bit for bit as good as the physical original they were created from.

More details on the format itself will be available at http://www.softpres.org. KryoFlux will soon be available from the KryoFlux webstore, for further information see: http://www.kryoflux.com. More information on the Emulator II is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mu_Emulator

That all is very very impressive. Great work!

And now the next one: reverse engineering Emulator I disks  ;) !!
(also Shugart interface, 5.25 inch, proprietary disk format)

Now this is weird. Again, that's exactly what I was dreaming of last night ....  ::)

The moment we get the impression the world is waiting for this... :)

It takes a lot of time and input to do so. I must assume there are more docs available somewhere. The last one took weeks to complete.

Please ask around what kind of material is available. Thanks!

Mmm... there are more documents about the Emulator II than about the Emulator I; and the specifications of the EII disks were not even documented.
As far as I heard from past employees of E-Mu, these specifications of course were documented at some point in time in the past, but quite some documents have been lost.
I guess during the the "typical" moves or fires  :)
Anyway, the Emulator I is one of the less documented samplers out there.

It is however always possible to find out the specs the way you did it with the EII, or alternatively by measuring the signals on the Side/Step and Data lines between the controller and the drive and then interprete these signals (I have been doing this during the last week for the Emulator II in order to find additional information that might help IFW in speeding up his reverse engineering steps, but Wintermute let me know that IFW had it all figured out already using the Kryoflux and reverse engineering of the Debug ROM :-).

I guess if I would
1/ have the Kryoflux device instead of my DSO (which would speed up capturing the signals)
2/ have an Emulator I here (which I don't... :)
I would be happy to reverse engineer it too, and then - of course - hope that the teams behind Kryoflux and HxC would "officially" support it in their devices as a native disk format.
But I guess I'm dreaming now, especially because I don't have an Emulator I  :-\
The Kryoflux I will order soon !

http://www.softpres.org/news:2010-11-11

who's gonna send us some champagne?

"This topic does not exist yet"  -     ??? 
Link doesn't work?!

see it. believe it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQvV2uFlU8

Peter, no tears yet because you have sold your Emulator I ?  ;D

I even think the instrument would add:
"It's an honour!"

Kind of like 'first man on the moon'...   :D :D

the moon landing conspiracy has been proved as a hoax. 
It's funny that we won't go back there isn't it?  :-\

But this looks very real. 

wow!

All the guys made a very good jab!