The Emulator II is rapidly approaching its 30th birthday and being an exceptionally complex piece of kit I thought it might be pushing it running it much more into the 21st century with that grizzly PSU and those two huge pcbs awash with dryed out power electrolytics and little tantalum hand grenades.
The PSU in the EII was clearly designed by a mad man! The rectifier diodes on the main 5V rail are mounted on heatsinks which surround a bank of smoothing caps - net result, the heatsink (which runs at a steady 60C) cooks the hell out of the caps! There are several tantalum caps which are just begging to go dead short, not to mention two class X2 caps which will result in a loud bang and clouds of smoke... they always do, eventually.
My wakeup call?? Well I have a 30 year old BBC Micro (those were the days!) which was working perfectly right up to the point it emitted a curious frying noise promptly followed by a significant amount of smoke in time with the lights dimming! In that case it was the Class X cap failing across the PSU mains input...
It's back in the living now...
Anyway, back to the EII. After an afternoon's fairly intense work, the pesky caps were replaced and after a slightly nervous powerup (EII PSUs don't take prisoners) she powered up and booted! Not bad considering I stripped her down to an empty chassis and disturbed everything in the process. EII's really don't like being moved - they are full of potentially bad connections thanks to a sea of 150 tarnished IC sockets.
The guys at E-mu really worked a miracle - the EII was a technological marvel and truly ground breaking. Coding up a sampler in Windows 7 today is clever but implementing a full blown multi-sampling workstation on two Z80 micros is just astounding!!
Made famous by some very major names, including Stevie Wonder, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, JMJ, Depech Mode and the Pet Shop Boys, it was really the first sampler to exploit the notion of sampling shaped by synthesis.
And at $7995 (around $16,000 in today's money) in 1984 it was "affordable" compared to the Fairlight!....
Today, although there are vastly more powerful samplers around, it still boasts a very special combination of querky companded 12 bit sampling stored as 8 bits coupled with 24dB/oct analog SSM filters.
It may only boast 1Mb sample memory slowly loaded up on 5.25" floppies but boy does it sound nice... and it's not what you'd expect - this is not S900 or Mirage 8 bit crunch, it's a sort thick, slightly distorted, sonic chocolate.
In short a true (abeit slightly troublesome!) classic...
A quick test following the recap - booted up with the famous Liquid Stacks Disk:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/bbdbz1NB: click on - "Click here to start download from sendspace" to download....
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