EMXP - Emu Sampler Disk and File Utility Software


EMXP is a free software utility primarily designed for use with vintage Emu samplers, especially Emax samplers.
It's not limited to Emax samplers, other vintage Emu samplers are also (partly) supported: Emulator II and Emulator III.

More info and a link to download it can be found here: http://users.skynet.be/emxp/

EIII: no more disk? Solution

The disk is Okay but the machine scans SCSI channels, or tells : "No disk",
or whatever...

Go to the processor board, take away and put back the NCR5380 in place. It
works 50% of the time. Or change it.

If the Emu is connected to external SCSI devices, touch the flat cable
(inside) going to the SCSI connector. If its hot, your external devices are
ripping off the emu and this wall happen again !

Thanks to Dr.C for providing this info.

EIII dead CPU board? Solution
A dead CPU board is very often due to a chip located on the front border of
the CPU board (the second one starting from the top.

Its a 74HCT244, labeled (if I remember well) : IC240. Its anyway easily
recognizable ; it has a few wires modification on the solder side

Change it to an 74LS244, taking great care to take note of the wire
modifications and installing the circuit on TWO HIGH QUALITY tulip single
on line (cutable) connector.

The change from HTC to LS is okay for this chip. Don't change them all !!!!!

Thanks to Dr.C for providing this info.

EIII won't start up? Solution
If one formats and install a disk in an EIII, or just maybe a system
install, the disk will go round and round, scanning the channels without
being able to boot.

Its a bug.

When you format and install a system, once you have finished and BEFORE
restarting the EIII, just save a bank, even a blank bank, it has no
importance, the idea is to have AT LEAST on bank, even empty, into the
directory, or the machine will never start when you power it up again.

By following these insructions, the machine will find an empty bank, start
on it, and here we go !

Thanks to Dr.C for providing this info.

How to calibrate EIII power supply


Thanks to Dr C., here is the complete calibration procedure for the EIII power supply.

READ CAREFULLY AND COMPLETELY BEFORE ATTEMPTING ANYTHING !!!

IF SOMETHING IS NOT CLEAR OF EVEN OBVIOUS IN OUR EXPLANATION,
JUST STOP !

Required equipment :

a) - Small isolated crewdriver compatible with the power supply adjustable
b) - Digital voltmeter with correct batteries (to be sure the voltage
reading is accurate)
c) - PCB cleaner (KF-F2) for example
d) - Black permanent marker (the kind to be used to write in CDs)
e) - EXTREME PRUDENCE, TAKING YOUR TIME AND THINKING OVER WHAT YOU DO.

PREPARATION

Put the Emu in a very stable position and well lighted

TAKE AWAY THE MAINS PLUG (220V), THE METAL PARTS OF THE POWER SUPPLY ARE ON
LIVE, EVEN IF THE POWER SWITCH IS OFF, AND THESE ARE LETHAL VOLTAGES.

Take off the top cover

See the adjustable on the power supply.

Using the permanent marker, trace a mark to be sure to find how it was
adjusted.

Verify if the screwdriver is compatible.

Set the voltmeter to voltage measurement, continuous current, at 20 V
caliber (for example).
Put a probe on one of the yellow cables of the card cage connector (not on
the power supply connector, see picture) and the other on the chassis, for
example.

Put the power plug on and put the machine on.

You must see a voltage around +5 V on your voltmeter. If not, something is
wrong. Verify where you have plugged the voltmeter and retry.

If yes, shut the machine down and take the power plug off the machine.

STATUS : Machine "OFF" and power plug away.

Put some PCB cleaning product on the adjustable and turn the adjustment
around with the screwdriver (to clean the inside of the adjustable).

Put the adjustable completely leftwise (anti clockwise) or more : like a
volume potentiometer to the minimum).

Go have a beer for 15 minutes, the time it dries.

Put now the cursor of the adjustable half way from the minimum and the
trace you have made with the marker.

Check everything, voltmeter probes in place, cat away, etc...

ADJUSTMENT

Power the Emu. You must read quite a low voltage (around 3 V) and the hard
disk doesn't even start.

This is normal

Gently turn the adjustment, clockwise, and the voltage should climb. If
not, something is WRONG.
As well, if you get to the trace you have done and the voltage is still
low, DO NOT OVERPASS THIS TRACE !!!!

The hard disk should start spinning around 4 - 4,5 V

Increase the adjustment until you read : 5,05 V. Not 5,5V, I say : 5,05 V.

Once you are at it, shut the machine down, do not attempt to perform any
bank load or anything else, the machine didn't start accurately whit its
normal sequence, so it will be crappy and you may even crash everything,
datas and hardware.

Take the screwdriver away, the voltmeter, put the cover and restart your
machine.

Keeping the Emulator III alive - Part 5: crashing & locking up

Recently my EIII started acting up again. This time the whole machine would crash. There were 3 kinds of crashes:
1. The EIII would lock up, the display would read "SCSI Hardware failure"
2. The EIII would just lock up. The screen showed junk characters and a random number of led's on the front panel would be active
3. The Hard Disk would shut down, but the EIII kept working. Sometimes the hard disk started spinning again. But most of the time the EIII would lock up.

At first I thought that the hard disk was failing but replacing the hard disk didn't solve the problem.

All the above problems were caused by one thing: The voltages on the power supply output were erraticly changing. Meaning that most of the time it was giving 11.00 Volt on a 12 Volt line (Orange wire), but sometimes the voltage would drop below 11 Volt causing the EIII to crash and the hard disk to shut down.

Solution: cleaning the trimpot on the power supply PCB and adjusting the voltage to the correct level (+12 V).

There's only 1 trimpot on the power supply so you can't go wrong.

I suggest you disconnect everything from the power supply, except the fans and/or the hard disk, when you adjust the voltage. Otherwise you migth fry something when the voltage peaks.

I used one of the fan connectors to read out the voltages.

Keeping the Emulator III alive - Part 4: Memory

When I first got my EIII it had been in storage for a few years. When I sampled a sound and played it back it sounded all distorted. This was due to the fact that the memory SIMMs didn't make proper contact with the memory sockets.

I took out the top card out of the card cage which contains the SIMMs. Took out all 16 SIMMs and cleaned the contacts with contact cleaner. I did this as well for all the SIMM sockets. Afterwards everything sounded fine.

The EIII comes in 2 memory sizes: 4MB and 8MB. The early 4MB version uses 16 x 'standard' 30 pin 256KB SIMMs. These are the same SIMMs that were used in the Atari ST. Later EIII models had 4 x 1M simms in the first 4 slots.

Rob from the Emulator Archive once let me know that: "EIII upgrades from 4MB to 8MB have become impossible. You can't get the PAL chips that address the extra memory. You need 2 of them and they are long since obsolete and unfortunately no one has managed to recreate them. We have the binaries from the E-mu Systems vault, but they don't work..."

Keeping the Emulator III alive - Part 3: The Power Supply

I'll try to be short on this one. Just hope that your Power Supply never dies. :-)

While testing all different kind of Hard Disks for my EIII (as explained in Part 1) I must have turned the EIII off and on once too many. At one point the EIII was totally dead. Power Supply had gone.

The Power Supply was made by Power-One, type SPL150-S109. But they have dropped all support for the SPL150-series and refused to provide me details about the power supply.

This is what the technical manual has to say about the power supply: EIII uses a switching power supply. We do not repair these supplies at the factory and do not even have schematics for them.

A technician helped fixing it but we were unable to trace a component, which looks like a transistor and might even be one, labelled Motorola 21407 8835 K. So if anyone knows what this is, please leave a comment.

I was lucky enough to find a second hand EIII power supply, not cheap though, and now my EIII is back up and running.

Here are the voltages from the power supply as described in the technical manual:
Green wire = ground
Orange wire = +12V
Yellow wire = +5V
Black wire = -14.25V to -15.75V
Red wire = +14.25V to +15.75V

Here's a photo of the internal power cable:


As you can see there's also a blue cable which is not described in the technical manual. I can now tell you that this is also a ground wire.

Keeping the Emulator III alive - Part 2: Disabled outputs

A common problem with aging EIII's are non working stereo outputs. If you test the unit, all 16 individual outputs will work but not the stereo ouput.
This is due to a faulty relay switch on the output board. This relay switch will disable the stereo output when the machine is turned off or on to prevent a popping sound through the speakers.
The relay is labelled Aromat DS2YE-S-DC5V and is in a yellow casing.

Solution: Replace the relay switch or bypass it. When you bypass it you'll hear a small pop when the machine is turned off or on but it's nothing major that can destroy you speakers.

The relay switch is the yellow component:


Here's is an excerpt from the EIII Technical Manual showing the output board schematics. The relay switch is the component in the red circle:


Here's a picture of the relay switched being bypassed:


UPDATE 17.02.07:

Dr C., an experienced EIII technician informs me of the following:

The above diagnosis is wrong.

The +5V transits to the board to power the relay by the leftmost flat
cable. Sometimes, it becomes bad.

In order to repair it, make a joint with a piece of wire (yellow if
possible), from one of the yellow cables of the power connector (the one of
the cards cage) and pin 8 of IC3.

Keeping the Emulator III alive - part 1: Internal Hard Disk

I own an Emulator III keyboard and although it's one of the best sounding samplers ever made it's also a high maintenance machine.

I am not a trained technician but found out that I have enough technical skills to keep the EIII going to this day. I'll post my EIII repairs/solutions here so other EIII users can benefit of it. Not that there are that many left. Only 1200 Emulator III's were ever made.

A while ago the internal Hard Drive decided it was time to meet its maker. It was still the original 40MB from 1987. The EIII needs its internal HD to operate. You can boot the machine with a OS floppy disk but the OS still requires a HD to be present on the internal SCSI cable.

Googling for a replacement drive only the Seagate ST51080N is mentioned on EIII related pages and forums. A 1GB SCSI drive that is still being sold for $225.

So I started going through all my spare SCSI drives and here's a list of EIII compatible HD's:

Quantum Trailblazer
IBM WDS-L80 (80MB) - As found in the Apple II si
Quantum ProDrive LT 700MB SCSI - As found in the PowerMac PPC6100
Quantum Maverick ProDrive - As found in PowerMac PPC8500

To format the HD I used the standard interleave setting of 2:1.

It took about 2 hours to get the Quantum Maverick HD formatted and verified. It is essential that you don't abort the verification process (like I did at first). When you do so, you won't be able to copy the OS onto the HD. If you try so, you'll get the Error: "Bank does not exists!".

I also tried more recent SCSI Hard Disk models but they don't get recognized by the EIII. If anyone knows why please let me know.


Here's a picture of the internal HD:

Old synths and EPROMS
A while ago my Akai S900 died on me because of a corrupt EPROM. For those of you who don't know, the EPROM chips contain the Operating System for your synthesizer/sampler. Once it's corrupt the device won't work anymore.

Since I have some old synths and samplers that contain EPROMs and I want to continue to use them for a long time I ordered an EPROM-programmer. I went for the SPEP plus which I bought here from Futurelec.
This little device permits you to read the contents of an EPROM, save it to disk or program another EPROM with it.
At first I was a bit afraid that I could harm the programmed EPROMS by reading them, but everything went just fine. It's a straightforward process. You put the programmed EPROM in the SPEP, read its content, insert a new EPROM and program it.

I made a backup of the EPROMs from my Akai VX600 and Emulator III. Once tested, I left the new programmed EPROMS in the synths. BTW, each device contains 2 EPROMS.

Here's a picture of the EIII while it's EPROMs are being swapped. I had to take the CPU board (second from above) out of the Card Cage to have access to the EPROMS.


I've put the EPROM images I made online for backup purposes.
You can download them here:

EMULATOR III - Version 2.0
EPROM type: 27128B
Label: IP381A EMU SYSTEMS 4088
Location: Lower left corner of the CPU board
download here

EPROM type: 27128B
Label: IP380A EMU SYSTEMS 4088
Location: To the right of the previous EPROM
download here

Update 19.09.07:
Dr C. notes two points to emphasize :
1. Do not use 27C128, use 27128, without the "C"
2. The eproms shoiuld have a suffix like : -60 or -80, this is the aduisition
time, in nanoseconds, so it should be (for example) :
AM27158-60, or TS27128-80
Any higher value than 80 will not work !

Akai VX600 - Version 1.2
EPROM type 27C256
Label: VX600 (1) V1.2
Location: Right in the middle of the main PCB
download here

EPROM type 27C64
Label: VX600 (2) V1.12
Location: At the right side of the main PCB
download here

Note: all files are in binary format.

Emulator III

I like making music with hardware stuff, no soft synths or soft sequencers for me. It's just what I like the best. I don't pretend that one or the other is better or worse.

I'd like to talk a little bit about my favourite sampler, the EIII. I will be using this blog to post various tips and tricks for the EIII in the future. My first sampler was a Commodore 64 with a DATEL Sampler module. My second sampler was the Akai S900. I also have Native Instruments Kontakt on my iBook. But since I decided not to use computers to create music I'm not using that one at anymore.

I found my EIII last year after making some phone calls to different recording studio's in Belgium. It didn't take me long to find one that was gathering dust which I could buy. But it wasn't in excellent condition. I had to restore the backlight, it had dead stereo outputs and when I played it samples would be digitally distorted. The filters also needed to be recalibrated. The distorted samples were a consequence of bad contacts between the memory simms and their sockets.

BTW, it's a 4MB model.

I use it in combination with an Apple PowerMac 7100/80 with a G3 processor and Audiomedia II card. The 7100 is connected with the EIII using SCSI. I run Alchemy 3.0 on the 7100 to edit and transfer samples between the two.

A lot of info about the EIII can be found at the Emulator Archive.

Here's a picture of my EIII:


And the EIII with it's cover open:


I'd love to hear about other EIII users and their experience with this machine. Please leave a comment.