Note, I this is the original documentation included with EMX, however I have also included the new FAQ and an icon I created to go with the program. John Silveria II ---------------------------------- Emax Utility Program v1.1 by Mike Prudence (mjp@hplb.hpl.hp.com) 1. Introduction The Emax utility program ('emx' to it's friends) is a small program that allows you to read, write and format Emax I and Emax II discs on your IBM PC or compatible. It's main use is to allow uploading and downloading of samples for transfer over the net. Once expanded, you should be left with a single executable,'emx.exe'. Copy this to a nice spot on your PC hard disc, and you're all set. emx deals with three types of files: o Emax I bank files, suffix '.em1'. o Emax II bank files, suffix '.em2'. o Emax operating system files,suffix '.emx'. As Emax I and II share the same disk format, interchange of samples between the two machines is possible. Saving an Emax II bank as a 'compressed' bank allows it to be uploaded, and then downloaded by an Emax I user onto an Emax I disc. Note that as emx only uploads and downloads the bank and sample data from/to an Emax disc, a compressed bank file uploaded from an Emax II disc will be directly downloadable onto a formatted Emax I disc. The operating system stored on the disc is not touched by the upload/download procedure. The following sections describe the use of emx in more detail. The procedures for using the program with an Emax I and an Emax II are identical, and hence I refer to both machines when talking about an 'Emax'. 2. Reading and Writing an Emax disc To read an Emax disc,place it in your PC 3.5" drive, and run emx. Select option 'R' from the menu, and answer the prompts. When the upload has finished, you will find a file of length 552999 bytes on your disc. This contains the bank and sample data from the Emax disc. Note that the operating system is not present in this file. This is saves a bit of space on your PC hard disc. Writing a file to an Emax disc is essentially the reverse of the above. Place the target Emax disc in your PC disc drive, and select the 'W' option from the emx menu screen. Give the filename to download, and sit back and wait. And wait. And wait. Uploading and downloading files takes quite a little while. (But see later under 'formatting'). 3. Grabbing and Putting the Emax Operating System If you intend to format Emax discs on your PC, you'll need to grab a copy of the Emax operating system from somewhere. The latest Emax II OS (2.14) can be found on the archive site under the 'emax2' directory. However, you can also upload and download a copy of the OS from an Emax disc. Again, stick the disc in the PC drive, and select 'G' from the emx menu. This will grab the operating system from the disc and place it in the specified file. As a default, emx will supply the name 'emaxos.emx' for the target filename. You are recommended to use this name, as the formatting procedure assumes it will find an operating system in a file of that name. If you own both an Emax I and an Emax II, life can get a little confusing at this point. To save your sanity, it's probably best to have separate directories on your PC hard disc - one for the Emax I and one for the Emax II. In each directory, you should grab a copy of the relevant operating system from an Emax I/II disc. You can also copy an Emax operating system from a hard disc file to an Emax floppy. I can't think quite why you'd want to do that, but you never know. 4. Formatting Emax discs. It is possible to format discs on the PC for use in an Emax. Although the actual formatting process takes about the same time as it does on an Emax (at least, this is true for my 386/20 PC and my Emax II), you do gain a couple of things by formatting on a PC. Firstly, uploading and downloading to discs formatted on the PC is a lot quicker than using Emax formatted discs. Naively, I expect this is due to the interleave factor used when formatting the discs. However, it doesn't seem to have any speed impact when using the discs in an Emax, so it could be something more subtle than that. The second gain comes if you have 200 discs to format. Using the PC and Emax in parallel, you can format in half the time. Formatting a disc is a two stage process. Stick a disc in the PC drive, and select the 'F' option from the emx menu. The disc will chug for a bit while it formats. When the format is complete, emx then writes a copy of the operating system to the disc. It obtains this from a file called 'emaxos.emx', funnily enough, which it expects to find in the current directory. So, if you have a copy of the relevant operating system, you can format discs for Emax Is *and* Emax IIs in your PC with ease. A slight warning, though. Formatted discs contain no bank information on them, and so will give the sensible message 'Bad Bank on Disc' if you try a bank load from them. You can, however, use the disc to boot from. 5. Other Hints and Tips This program was written on a HP Vectra 386/20. If you're using one of these, you'll need to use the INDSKBIO.SYS driver, to make the disc drive act like a normal, PC compatible disc drive. Without this driver, you can still format discs, and subsequently read and write these disks. However, you won't be able to access discs formatted on an Emax. In addition to the bank and sample data, emx tacks a small header onto the front of saved disk files. This just identifies the emx version, and allows me to provide backwards compatibility should the need arise in the future. This adds 39 bytes to the size of the file, which is why 552999 is not a multiple of 2 or 512. If you have an questions, problems, or suggestions concerning emx, please contact the author: Mike Prudence (mjp@hplb.hpl.hp.com) I'm not a PC guru, and I don't have an Emax I, but I'm keen to get this program running on as many platforms as possible. emx is written using standard C, and compiled with Microsoft C v6.0. The source code is available Revision History: V1.0 First trial release. This uploaded the whole disc image, giving ginormous 819200 byte files for each disc image. V1.1 A little bird told me where the bank and sample data can be found on an Emax disc, so I was able to modify the program to only upload the relevant bits from the disc. This also helps out when downloading compressed banks created on an Emax II to an Emax I disc, as the operating system is no longer overwritten by emx. This release also added disc formatting to the emx menu, and the ability to upload/download just the operating system from an Emax disc.