----------------------------------------------------------------------- Emax II Frequently Asked Questions v. 1 -- February, 1993 v. 2 -- July, 1996 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello, This is v. 2 of the Emax II FAQ. I have taken the Emax II FAQ originally written by James Grahame, Grahame@Sask.USask.CA. and updated it to contain the updated information I have gathered from E-mu and the many friendly people on the emu-samplers mailing list. The most recent version of the FAQ is available at my ftp site; ftp.aimnet.com/pub/users/qsite/Emax_2 Please let me know if there is any incorrect information or something you would like me to add. John Silveria II, qsite@aimnet.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Resources To join the emu-samplers mailing list, simply send mail to majordomo@linux.wineasy.se with the single word subscribe in the message body. I am working on my own website devoted to both the Emax and the Emax II the URL is http://users.aimnet.com/~qsite/emax ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Table of Contents 1) What's the latest Operating System? 2) What configurations of Emax II's has E-mu sold over the years? 3) What is the price of memory upgrades? 4) Can I add an internal hard drive to the Emax II? 5) What about adding external drives? 6) Will any SCSI CD-ROM drive work with the Emax II? 7) What about removable media? 8) Are there any hidden functions and tricks in the Emax II? 9) Is there an archive of Emax samples? 10) Who sells good sounds for the Emax II? 11) Is the Emax II compatible with other samplers? 12) What can I do about the high pitch hum my Emax II is generating? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (1) What's the latest version of the Emax II operating system? The last operating system E-mu released was 2.14 and since they have discontinued the Emax II they have no plans of any further software revisions. (2) What configurations of Emax II's has E-mu sold over the years? The first offering by Emu was a 1MB, mono sampling model. This was replaced in mid 1990 by a stereo model with 2MB on the main board. There is a "Turbo" model which includes a 105MB Quantum hard drive and 8MB of memory. Initially, the "Turbo" designation indicated that a machine had a 40MB internal drive and 4MB RAM. (3) What is the price of memory upgrades? At the time of v. 1 of this FAQ E-mu was charging about $195 to upgrade a 1Mb Emax II to 2Mb. It involves removing the 64K DRAM chips on the motherboard & replacing them with 256K x 4 DRAMS (80 nanosecond). The sockets are already in place for the upgrade. The Emax II only has room for 2MB on the motherboard. More than that requires the addition of a plug-in daughter board. The "bare" daughter board comes with 2MB of memory, expanding the Emax II to 4MB. Adding more than that is simply a matter of plugging in additional DRAM chips which are Intel 214114s and using an install disk to make the machine recognize the change. The most recent news I have received from E-mu was that the price of memory upgrades is now $185 per 2Mb upgrade. They did not indicate whether that included the new daughterboard if it was needed. They do not sell or offer the memory installation disk and from what I've been told the install disk can only be ran once, at the end of the upgrade it is not reusable. (4) Can I add an internal hard drive to the Emax II? Certainly; E-mu offers a 105MB SCSI Quantum drive kit. Unfortunately, the drive costs an arm and a leg from E-mu. The Emax II has an internal power cable for a drive, and a 50 pin SCSI connector is located on the edge of the digital PCB, near the external SCSI connector. Adding a drive is simply a matter of plugging it in and formatting it. Beware of older hard drives, in particular Maxtor drives. Older drives seem to be too slow powering up and if the drive is not ready when the Emax II looks to it for the operating system the Emax II won't boot up. I have one of these drives and this is the best work around I've come up with; assign SCSI 2 as your boot drive (SCSI 0 is the floppy drive and SCSI 1 should be your internal drive.) What will happen is that the Emax II will try to locate SCSI 2 for approximately 10 seconds and when it fails it will default back to SCSI 1 and by that time the hard drive is powered up. Warning! The Emax II can only format up to 540Mb on a hard drive, anything over that will go unused. Originally it was thought that if you had 8Mb of memory and since the Emax II can store 100 banks that the largest drive needed would be 800Mb. This is a software problem (reminds me of DOS) and since E-mu have no plans of anymore software revisions any drive over 540Mb would be a waste of money. (5) What about adding external drives? Piece of cake. Most simply plug in; you'll need an external SCSI drive and a Mac-type SCSI cable (Centronics to 25 pin). Before you can use the drive, you'll have to format it, though. (6) Will any SCSI CD-ROM drive work with the Emax II? Buyer beware. Emu suggests that you use drives with TOSHIBA or SONY mechanisms. Don't buy until you've tried it out! There is a list of drives available at http;//www.spies.com/ but this list is old and geared for the Emulator III so not all drives may be compatible. (7) What about removable media? E-mu use to offer a Syquest(230?)removable media drive in a 2 space rack, but I don't know if they still do. The price on it was quite more than what it would cost to buy one from a computer store. The preferred choices of the emu-samplers mailing list seem to be either the IOMEGA Zip drive or the Syquest EZ135 drive. What I know about these drives is that the Zip drives store 100Mb per cartridge and has an access time of 26ms and the EZ 135 stores 135Mb and has an access time of 13ms, also the EZ 135 costs more than the ZIP. For opinions contact the mailing list. (8) Are there any hidden functions and tricks in the Emax II? Select the MASTER module. choose option 9. The display will give youa choice of 1-8. Again, press 9. When prompted for a password, enter3629 ("EMAX" on a telephone touchpad). These functions include disk and memory testing functions. Be warned that most of the hard drive utillities will erase anything stored on your hard drive. Use at your own risk. (9) Is there an archive of Emax samples? You can find a small selection of user created banks at http://www.spies.com/Emu. Besides banks there is a program called EMX for transferring sounds from an Emax/Emax II diskette to a PC written by Mike Prudence. This is the transfer mechanism for samples uploaded to the FTP site too. LHARC is the chosen compression package for the FTP site, also. (10) Who sells good sounds for the Emax II? The first stop would have to be your local E-mu dealer. Hopefully, they've got the E-mu library. If they do, copy away! The best (and most cost effective) way to get Emax II samples is via CD-ROM. Emu offers a collection of 4 CD-ROMs, priced at $199 each. Invison has several Emax II CD-ROMs (pop instruments, classical) which are available for $275 a crack. Q up Arts (formed by a group of Optical Media employees)offer six CD-ROMs ranging in price from $199 to $399. They include two disks of SFX, pop instruments, classical, and a couple of stacked instrument sound discs. Keyboard magazine also reviews new CD-Roms and sampling CDs. (11) Is the Emax II compatible with other samplers? The Emax II is compatible with disks from the original Emax. However,the samples are expanded from 8 bit to 16 bit format. Additionally, the Emax II has digital filters and DCAs, while the Emax's were analog. Generally,the sounds transfer well, but some may require a little bit of tweaking, and loops occasionally sound glitched. Remember, the original Emax was limited in the amount that one could pitch-shift a sample upwards. The Emax II can shift +/- 5 octaves, so you can reassign samples to take advantage of this. Also, there can be problems with samples that have loops less than 32 samples long. (12) What can I do about the high pitch hum my Emax II is generating? I recieved this information from E-mu. The High Pitched Hum is being generated by the LCD. The backlight portion of it is vibrating so fast, that it actually produces an anoying whine. There are two things you can do. You can either purchase a new display ($126.14) or you can do a little mod to the display. If you place a little peice of cardboard (like a matchbook cover) between the LCD display and the board it sits on, the whine will disappear. The only bummer is, its really hard to get to the LCD. You will need to take the keyboard assembly out, then the main CPU board, then the front pannel board. Basicly everything but the output board. Well, that's it for v. 2. Hope it's been helpful. John Silveria II, qsite@aimnet.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------