EIII Hard Disk Image

[luncheonticket]

Hello to everyone!

I need to restore the OS image on my Emulator III, because its SCSI hard drive died a couple of days ago. I bought a SCSI2SD interface to replace it, but I misplaced the original OS floppy and backups.

What would be the correct procedure to restore the OS on the SCSI2SD interface? Do I need to create a new OS floppy (IIRC I have a floppy OS image backup somewhere) and then install the OS with the sampler, or can I create a SCSI2SD OS hard disk image directly from a tool such as EMXP?

Thanks in advance!

[esynthesist]

Currently the easiest way is copying an existing hard disk image with OS to the SD card.
The current version of EMXP (v3.07) can format SCSI2SD cards and it can also deal with multiple partitions on these cards, but it can't copy operating systems for Emulator-III yet (as opposed to operating ssytems of Emax and Emax-II which are already suported. Emulator-III operating systems will be supported in the next version.

I will put some hard disk images for Emulator-III and Emulator-IIIX on my website tomorrow.
Then you can simply download one of them and copy it to the SD card, either with EMXP or with any other raw image copy software. Once the image is copied to a partition on the SD card, you will be able to boot the Emulator-III. But you might have to re-calibrate your Emulator-III, since the cailbration data was stored on your previous hard disk :-)

[esynthesist]

You can download bootable hard disk images for the Emulator-III and Emulator-IIIX here:
http://www.emxp.net/Additional_downloads.htm

There's a README file in the ZIP files which explains how to make a bootable hard disk.

[dvdborn]

A big thanks for creating the bootable hard disk images. I'm sure a lot of users will find them useful.

[luncheonticket]

Thanks a lot!!! I'll let you know as soon as I get my EIII to work.

Sorry for the delay on my response, I've been away the last couple of weeks (winter break in Argentina started last Monday so I had lots of work-related stuff to solve lately).

[luncheonticket]

Well, the raw images worked flawlessly and now I have a working EIII again! Thanks!!!!! 

I'd like to create a blank disk images with some samples, sequences, etc. Can I do that with these blank disk images and EMXP?

[esynthesist]

You can use EMXP to copy any existing EIII bank file (.E3B, .E3X, .EB3) to these blank EIII HD images or to the SD cards that were created based on these blank images.
It's also possible to generate (or construct) EIII bank files starting from WAV files with EMXP: the bank files will then contain EIII samples for each of these WAV files.
And you can also use EMXP to convert banks from other Emu samplers (like EII, Emax) or to convert SoundFont2 banks to EIII bank files.
An interesting approach could to use a free SoundFont2 editor software (like Viena or Polyphone) to create a bank from scratch, and then convert it with EMXP into EIII format. But make sure to define one or more presets and assign each sample to at least one preset, because the conversion engine of EMXP ignores samples that have not been assigned to a preset.

If you cant to create EIII banks and have FULL control about ALL possible preset/sample/sequence parameters supported by the EIII, you'll have to create/edit the banks (and save them to the SCSI2SD card) on the EIII itself or you can use a MIDI remote controller software (either the original Emu software or the version created by a forum member for macOS, see http://eiiiforum.com/index.php?topic=2687.0)

[luncheonticket]

EMXP is great! I just finished creating my custom SCSI2SD card.

I ended up creating 4 256mb "disks" for the E-III. Then, I downloaded these Emax banks:

http://www.hermannseib.com/english/synths/emax/fds/floppy.htm

Converted them to EmuIII and saved them in one of the images provided. Then, I joined four 256mb disk files (with a little help from linux ) and DDed the resulting 1GB file to my SD card. After that, I configured SCSI2SD to use four 256mb LUNs and voila, everything is working as it should!!

Just for future reference, here are the steps I used. I find both linux and osx nicer to work with raw disk images, so I used Debian to combine the disk images, dump them to the sdcard, and configure the scsi2sd interface. I had to use a windows vm for emxp though.

1. In scsi2sd util, I created four devices of exactly 256mb in size. I used SCSI IDs 1, 3, 4 and 5, different serial number for each and automatic sector start. (in this case, these LUNs would start in sectors 0, 524288, 1048576 and 1572864).

2. Then, I saved some banks in the 250mb disk image found here:

www.emxp.net/Additional_downloads.htm

3. I padded the 250mb disk file to 256mb using the linux command truncate:

# truncate -s 256M diskfile1.iso

4. Did the same thing to three additional copies of the 250mb disk image:

# truncate -s 256M diskfile2.iso
# truncate -s 256M diskfile3.iso
# truncate -s 256M diskfile4.iso

5. Then, I joined all four disk images in a larger 1GB file:

# cat diskfile1.iso diskfile2.iso diskfile3.iso diskfile4.iso > diskfileS.iso

6. Last, I dumped the 1GB file in the micro sd card:

# dd if=diskfileS.iso of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M
# sync;sync

7. Finally, just popped in the sd card in the scsi2sd interface, and installed it in my EmuIII. It booted successfully, and all the banks I downloaded work great!

Thank you very much for your assistance, this wouldn't be possible without your help.

[esynthesist]

Great !

I'd like to add that you could have used EMXP to copy the four 250 MB images to each of the SCSI2SD partitons on the SD card. This can be donel by choosing option 1-->5-->3-->1-->select 250MB image-->4 
This option copies a hard disk image to an actual hard disk (here SD card). So if you want to copy the four 250MB images to the four SCSI2SD partitions, you'll have to perform this procedure 4 times (once per image).

After having selected option 4, EMXP will display an overview of the available destination drives.
You then select the SD card drive and press the "C" shortcut key instead of simply pressing ENTER.
Pressing "C" instructs EMXP to scan the SD card for its SCSI2SD partitions and to show each partition as a seperate drive.
To use this feature, you will have to enter the SCSI2SD partition parameters first (=the parameters that were used in scsi2sd-utiil), because EMXP needs this information in order to find/detect the partitions on the SD card. EMXP will ask you to enter these parameters (called a SCSI2SD configuration in EMXP) when you press the "C" shortcut key for the first time.
Once you have entered the SCSI2SD configuration parameters, you won't have to do this again the next time you access the SD card: EMXP will remember the configuration (and up to 10 configurations can be defined for 10 different SCSI2SD setups).

But you can use the truncate & copy approach in Linux as well of course...

[rectape]

Thanks for the great work👍👍👍

[Culler]

You can start making significant gains with this whey protein and download bootable hard disk images for the Emulator-III and Emulator-IIIX here:
http://www.emxp.net/Additional_downloads.htm

There's a README file in the ZIP files which explains how to make a bootable hard disk.

I'm so glad the bootable hard disk images exist. Thanks for the info!

[ARES]

the problem :

1- I formatted the HDD without saving a blank bank since when I want to save something, the EIII tells me "bank doe not exist"

2- when I try to boot via the floppy disk drive, it's HDD in scsi 1 which is mounted ( i cannot boot only by de floppy... )

3- As a result, I can not access the options of the EIII which always answers the same thing

How to get out of this situation ??

Thanks in advance.

ARES

[Wolfram]

What's happened if you boot from floppy?
Normally you don't need a working HD to boot from floppy. So what is exactly happened if you boot from floppy?

[ARES]

Thanks for the reply !

The EIII just starts to say :

-  "booting from floppy"
-   and then    " checking SCSI 1.."
-   .... till        " checking SCSI 7"
-   and then    " booting from the floppy"   
-   and then    " booting from SCSI 1"   
-   and then    " mounting drives"   ... so that it' s the HDD which is mounted !


So the EIII don't want to stay at the floppy disk to boot ...


I've formatted a floppy disk with omniflop with 3.5 DD  disk ( 720 k ) and written de os 2.42 taken from EMXP.

==> I've tried to write with all the possibilities of omniflop : format with emax ( as said by EMXP ) - EIII 800k - EIII HD ...

==>The process said me always : "successful"  ( but when i try to format with EIII HD with a 3.5 HD floppy , the process always stops  ? 80 % ... )


But strange thing, when i go to EMXP and tried to put a sound to the floppy , EMXP said me it's impossible because the format is EMAX...

Is it the origin of the problem ?

How to format correctly un floppy disk to put in EIII OS ?


Thank you to all of you !

[esynthesist]

I think you used the correct procedure to format the EIII floppy disk with Omniflop:
1) Use a Double Sided Double Density floppy disk (not High density)
2) Format the disk in OmniFlop by using the "80/2/10*512 EIII 800kB" format (you can also use the "80/2/10*512 Emax (standard) 800kB" format, it's the same...)
The disk is now ready for saving either sound data or an operating system to it.

To save the operating system on it and make it a bootable floppy disk:
1) Download the operating system floppy image here: http://users.skynet.be/emxp/EIIIOS242.zip
2) Unzip the file
3) Write the file to the floppy disk in OmniFlop.
Now it should be possible to boot the Emulator-III from floppy disk, and then format the Emulator-III hard disk.

An Emulator-III floppy disk can not contain an operating system AND sound data on the same disk. So either the disk contains an operating system (and nothing else), or it contains sound bank data (and no operating system).

Please note that EMXP v3.07 does not support floppy disks for the Emulator-III/IIIX. It only supports floppy disks for Emax and Emax-II.
So it's not possible to save Emulator-III sounds to floppy disk with EMXP. For the Emulator-III/EIIIX, EMXP only supports hard disks and hard disk image files (next to native sound bank files).
EMXP v3.07 also doesn't support Emulator-III operating systems yet (no matter what type of disk or file is used). But that feature will be added on v3.08.

The reason why EMXP says the floppy disk is an Emax disk (although you formatted it for Emulator-III) is because the physical format structure of Emax floppy disks and Emulator-III floppy disks is identical.

The next version of EMXP will fully support Emulator-III/IIIX operating systems, including copying them from/to floppy disks (and hard disks of course).