SOUND BANKS and CD roms for EII

[Elmbeatz]

 

I also didn't succeed in uprading my second EII to RS 422. I plugged in the interface, soldered the connections, but: no success. "Cannot communicate with the EII".

Wintermute advised me of checking if all kludges mentioned in the service manual have been done (page 127 and following) - which I haven't in fact. I just wanted to give it a try, but it seems that these kludges indeed HAVE to be done ... which at this time - to me - REALLY is impossible (I mean just READING the details about what has to be done is giving me headaches).

Nevermind, it works as it did before, and I still got my primary EII which is my macs best friend 
It would have been nice though to have a second one that can communicate..

E-synthesist, keep up the good work, don't let it get you down. Maybe you wake up one night with a flash of genious... You will, I bet 

Greetz,
Elm.

[esynthesist]

I didn't even know that there were some kluges required before installing the RS422 board...
Just having taken a look at these pages of the service manual I instantly got a headache too 
The same kind of headache which attacked me when I was reading the "installation" procedure for adding SCSI support to the Rev2 EMAX-I samplers... as a result I still don't have SCSI on that Emax...

About my PC-EII communication efforts: today I was in a shop and found a USB<-->RS232 converter which could be clocked at 500kbaud, so I bought it and tried it out immediately. Although its voltage levels are much higher than the ones on the RS422 port, the communication is even worse with the EII  In fact the EII is not reacting at all on any command it receives from my PC...
Maybe I will try to find another USB<-->RS422 converter (which would be my third one already) and hope that its signals will be somewhat higher...

[wintermute]

@elm
Sorry to hear your conversion project did not work well.
The kludges are necessary indeed. When I received my EII I checked all the kludges and luckily had been done already (the EII was well serviced from what I saw). Doing those kludges requires some basic understanding of soldering and electronics. But its not that hard to do those fixes.

@all
I had the chance to try out some OMI EII banks with sequences. And I can now confirm that the converted OMI banks include them and that they are working. Some of them are a little boring while others are great 80s sequences only missing some Van Halen guitar riff .

@e-synthesist
I'm happy you did not give up that easily! Hope the new interface will work out. Btw. did you try some old PC with a build in RS232 interface? I think I saw some dongle to convert RS232 to RS422 for the parallel port.

[12bit]

News flash.

The conversion tool is ready and I succeeded in converting the first two OMI CDs to a set of EII files for SoundDesigner.

///E-Synthesist

Dear E-Synthesist.

Any chance this software can be downloaded from somewhere ?
I'd like to convert all three of my OMI discs.

Thanks;

Kenneth

[esynthesist]

Any chance this software can be downloaded from somewhere ?

No.
Check your e-mail for some explanation...

///E-Synthesist

[esynthesist]

Btw. did you try some old PC with a build in RS232 interface? I think I saw some dongle to convert RS232 to RS422 for the parallel port.

Hi Wintermute,
No, I didn't try a built-in RS232 on an old PC. The reason is double: (1) I have no old PC with RS232 which is capable of running Windows XP... (2) Traditional RS232 ports do not support high speed communication at 500kbaud. Only the most recent ones, based on new IC design, can handle the full range between about 200 bps and 1 Mbps.
I'm thinking now about buying a digital scope to trace exactly what's going on (and to use it for other purposes too I hope, given the price of such equipment  )
But again: if the conclusion would be that some custom hardware or customisation of the EII port is required, I don't think a lot of EII or Emax users will be interested anymore... 

[Elmbeatz]

... or customisation of the EII port is required, I don't think a lot of EII or Emax users will be interested anymore... 

I think so, too. I would be interested, but I'm just no electrician at all, and I'm left handed in modding electronics 

[EIII]

And yet again The master did it !

I would have loved such utility a few years ago when i did the translation of the thrid cds manually with floppies....

it took about one month, few hours a day to do it !! a true nightmare !

[esynthesist]

Hi all

I just want to give some information about a problem I detected with the OMI UOS 1 cdrom this week.

This CD-ROM (or some versions of it) seems to contain inconsistencies.
Starting from bank ELECTRIC PIANO 2 until bank HARP GLISSES MAJOR 9 U/D,  the name of the bank does not match the actual bank behind it. The actual bank is in fact the one belonging to the next bank entry.
E.g. the bank index contains bank 31 ELECTRIC PIANO 2 followed by bank 32 Clavinet. If you select the Electric Piano 2 bank, the Clavinet bank will be loaded. And this goes on like this until bank 158.

This also means that the actual ELECTRIC PIANO 2 bank is missing on the CDROM, while the actual HARP GLISSES MAJOR 9 U/D bank has been burned twice on the CDROM by OMI.

As a consequence, my little extraction program which I provided to some members of this forum will extract all 540 banks from the CDROM, but all files between the one named "ELECTRIC PIANO 2" (numbered 33 by my program) and the one named "HARP GLISSES MAJOR 9 U/D" (numbered 160 by my program) contain bank data which belongs to the "next" file.

I checked this problem with Ron on this board who owned these CDROMs too and he confirmed that there was indeed a problem with his UOS1 CD also.
So to my opinion this problem lies in the original CDROM... but if anyone on this board owns a UOS1 CDROM which seems not to have this problem, I'd like to hear from you !

To all people who already used my extraction software: the generated banks are 100 pct OK but you'll just have to live with the inconsistent file naming in about 130 bank files. Or you could rename them all :-)

///E-Synthesist
  

[marty]

Hi

      a bit new here and looking for cdrom image sof the emulator libraries , can anyone share these ? i can share back a huge resource of samples - ive spent the last 2 years hiring and sampling synths including some unsual stuff like a novamod sh101  , really interested in trading sounds.Please message me  , i am really after the old factory and classic emulator sounds , in particular 'green ' ethnic sounds

cheers

marty

[esynthesist]

Update from the RS422 PC <--> Emulator II front:

This weekend I finally succeeded in getting a custom built USB/RS422 device work between my Emax and my PC. The device and its firmware have been designed in a way that it should also be compatible with the Emulator II.
Anyway it works great with the Emax: I can succesfully transfer complete soundbanks between my Windows laptop and my Emax-I now.

So I hope the signal levels of the device are OK for the Emulator II too. But the even more important clock synchronization problems which I encountered during all my previous RS422 attempts are for sure gone with this new device !
I will do some tests as soon as possible with my Emulator II and will report the results on this forum.
If it works, this rather inexpensive device will be a nice extension for EII enthousiasts. In that case EMXP will be upgraded to support the bank transfer of course...

///E-Synthesist

[midipuppies]

 

[Elmbeatz]

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

O H   M Y   G O D ! ! ! ! !

I knew it!
U are a genious!

 

[esynthesist]

I have tested the device with the Emulator-II today.

And it works !

I succeeded in transferring sound banks between my PC and the EII in both directions.

There's just a small problem left with respect to the maximum supported datapacket size in the communication. This doesn't have any impact on the reliability of the transfer, but it makes the transfer slower than on the Mac.
But I hope to resolve this issue in the firmware of the device.

FYI: current throughput statistics are:
- send bank from EII to PC: about 22 seconds  (about 13 seconds on Mac)
- send bank from PC to EII: about 18 seconds  (about 13 seconds on Mac)
It's acceptable I guess, but it would be nice if I could increase the speed.
We'll see.

I'll take a break now.

///E-Synthesist

[esynthesist]

Update:

The firmware is OK now and supports the full packet size.
The speed gain is pretty low though (1 to 2 seconds better) so I will now check the test software I have written on the PC side. It's either a "programmed delay" (which can be solved) or "USB communication overhead" (with which we would have to live...).

In general, banktransfers in about 20 seconds are possible at this moment.