Questions about Sound Designer and virtual Macs

[ahaigh01]

Hello to everyone,

I have an opportunity to buy an EII+ from a friend and former bandmate.  The EII+ appears to be in near-perfect condition at this time.  I went to his house to check it out last week and everything was working fine.  The unit has had a very easy studio-only life with light usage and has probably only been moved a couple of times. I loaded some banks from both floppy drives and did a little bit of sampling.  I will most likely be buying this EII+ soon.

In the last week or so I have been reading everything I can about EMXP, the emuser, HxC, Sound Designer and so on.  I don’t own a vintage Mac at this time but I have the Basilisk II emu running  System 7.5.3 and I have downloaded Alchemy 3.0, TurboSynth 2.21, Sound Designer Universal 1.5 and Sound Designer EII from the Yahoo EII group

The first three programs are .sit files and I have gotten them all to run in Basilisk.  The Sound Designer EII is a .bin file and I don’t know how to get this file to open up correctly on the virtual Mac.  I get an “error -39”.  I have seen others asking about error -39 as well, but supposedly this is a working copy – I just don’t know what to do with the file I guess.

The other problem I have run into is that on Sound Designer Universal, which does run in the virtual Mac, I can’t seem to get an EII bank to be recognized by the software and open up.  I downloaded these banks also from the Yahoo group and un-stuffed the .sit files on the virtual Mac.  I read in the SD documentation that it is possible to work on sounds in SD even without and EII connected and to listen through the Mac sound manager.  So it seems to me that even though this is a virtual Mac with no EII connected I should be able to load an EII bank into the software.  When I go to “open” the banks that I have on the Mac desktop don’t show up at all, although looking at the files sitting on the desktop they show "EII" with the floppy disk icon.  Also the “mode” menu is not there in SDU but I assume this is because it is not communicating with an EII – is this correct? 

So if any of you kind people could shed some light it would be appreciated greatly!

Questions:

1. Is anyone using Basilisk to run SD? Is it possible, worthwhile?  Or is an actual vintage Mac the only solution.  I suppose Basilisk communicating with an emuser properly would be too good to be true!

2. What am I doing wrong with the Sound Designer E II.bin file, getting the error -39?  Is it a disk image and if so how can I make it readable?

3. How do I open an EII SD bank in SD Universal?  They don’t show up in File – Open.

4.  Those of you working with SD and EMXP – what is your workflow for moving banks from SD on Mac to EMXP and emuser on PC? Resource fork issues etc?  I don’t know that much about System7 at this point.  How do you guys work? Setup etc?

Thanks in advance for any help
Alan

[JMP]

Hi Alan, congrats on 'almost' picking up an EII.

I'm not aware of Sound Designer Universal working with the EII, only the SD created for EII that you have downloaded from the yahoo forum. I think .bin is another type of compression that can be opened by Stuffit Expander on the Mac or alternatively Mac Disk program on the PC, I seem to recall it prompts you to expand the file when saving to floppy. I'm a bit rusty on this so someone else may clarify...

I use a SCSI Zip drive with the Mac and USB zip with the PC to move banks between the two and load/convert within EMXP.

Hope this helps.

[esynthesist]

Hi Alan

Just like JMP I'm not an SD Universal user.
But I doubt that SD Universal can open SD for EII bank files.
It's very important to understand the difference between SD Sound files and SD Bank files.
The SD Sound format is more "generic" than EII bank files. As far as I know EII bank files could only be recognized by Sound Designer for EII, and even in that software they can only be used to upload them to the Emulator-II through RS422.
In my opinion none of the SD softwares can edit/construct bank files; they can however edit individual samples (loops, truncates, ...) and play them through the Mac speakers.

Most probably the EII files you have downloaded from the Yahoo group are .EII or SD Bank files, not sample files.
In any case, the resource fork must be set correctly.
For .EII bank files, these are: Filetype = E2BK, Creator = XFER. If not set, SD for EII will not see the files.

I'm not a BasiliskII user neither; the main reason is that I'm suffering from the "black screen" phenomenon all the time, no matter what version of BasiliskII I'm using...
Note that BasiliskII is not able to use the EmuSer as a normal COM port. A few months ago I have had a quick look at it because someone was asking me about it. Basilisk can only use the PC COM ports as standard (asynchronous) RS232 ports. The source code of Basilisk must be changed and customized for use with the EmuSer. Maybe I will do that once 
How to get the .bin file into Basilisk is not clear to me. When using HFVExplorer, I don't succeed in transferring the file to the HD image... but as I said, I'm not an experienced user.

///E-Synthesist

[Elmbeatz]

Buy an ancient mac if you want to swap around SD4EII files. Or get an HxC device.

[ahaigh01]

Yes I suppose that is the thing to do - buy an ancient Mac.  I have had a lot of learning experiences with the Basilisk emulator over the last few days.  I've gotten pretty close, but still can't get that .bin file to open. Anything in a .sit file is no problem - turbosynth, alchemy, and SDU.  Would anyone like to make a .sit file of SDEII and upload it?  Or is it a program that must run from a floppy?  Also, anyone know why SD Universal is suppose to be incompatible?  The EII is in the dropdown menu of supported samplers and it was originally an EII program in the first place.  It just doesn't seem logical to me.  Thanks for the help guys
Alan

[JMP]

Yes I suppose that is the thing to do - buy an ancient Mac.  I have had a lot of learning experiences with the Basilisk emulator over the last few days.  I've gotten pretty close, but still can't get that .bin file to open.

Have you tried Mac Disk program yet like I mentioned above? I'm sure that file will be advised by Mac Disk to be a binary file and prompt you to have it expanded, saving it to floppy in the correct format to transfer to Mac. I think the program is available within the Yahoo EII Users forum files. 

[ahaigh01]

Hi JMP

I have tried Mac Disk.  The thing is, I am working with a virtual Mac on Basilisk, (System 7.5.3) and trying to get it to work with a virtual floppy drive installed on my XP (host)machine - which has no hardware floppy drive and not even a floppy port on the mother board.  However with a virtual floppy drive (VFD is the name of the program) I created a blank floppy disk image, mounted it, formatted it in Mac format through MacDisk and and wrote the .bin file to the floppy.  MacDisk sees this floppy drive and disk and is able to read and write files to it in Mac format no problem. So even though it's virtual (shouldn't matter) I think I did everything right on that end - I.E. I have a floppy drive on an XP machine - the disk is a Mac disk - MacDisk can read and write files to it.  Now the problem is with Basilisk I think.  I have configured Basilisk use to my PC's floppy drive but when I am in System7 the drive just never shows up.  That where I am with it. 

But I did just think of something new just now - maybe I need to do a fresh install of system7 with the floppy drive present on on install - I added the floppy drive after the fact and it doesn't find the drive in system7.  Or maybe there is a floppy driver in System7 that needs to be enabled.  I should try that next. 

Question - does SDEII _have_ to run from the Mac's floppy drive or can it be copied to and run from the harddisk?  If so there still may be hope for my experiment by having the program brought into system7 via a .sit file, already extracted from the .bin  (which haven't achieved yet and my not be able to).  Sit files have given me no problems, and the other 3 programs that were packed as .sit files from the yahoo group are running on my System7.

[ahaigh01]

Hi E-Synthesist,
Thanks for the info.  I kinda figured that the emuser would not be able to talk correctly with Basilisk through its ports but wouldn't it be great if it could! I experienced the "black screen" too when I tried to migrate my Basilisk setup from my studio pc which is XP32 over to my laptop which is W764.  I switched to the 2008 ver of Basilisk then and it worked.

[JMP]

I'd just forget this virtual Mac thing (that I don't really understand anyway). Just get an old Mac and run it on there as everyone else does, you're just creating yourself more problems. There's loads of vintage Macs on Ebay (Classics and SE's particularly) and they don't sell for much. Once you have SD on floppy disk you just copy it over to the HD and run it from there.

[wintermute]

Only to prevent you from going thru the same process...Virtual Macs do not work with the EII. Maybe you can start SD but thats it. There is no way to transfer or edit EII data on a virtual machine (because of software restrictions and/or timing problems with the interfaces).

Just do as everyone suggested and get an old Mac. The one thing you can do with Basilisk is to transfer Data (via Zip or whatever) to your ancient Mac. I even compiled the OS disk for my Mac Plus using an disk image of a Mac emulator.

It takes some time to get there...but it's worth it!