emusonacid! legacy

I have allways wished they had brought out another hardware sampler with huge fat memory. I have spoken to people and been informed there is no real reason why the emu motherboard could not be modified to accept more memory, in fact as they are 32 bit, up to 4 gig (though only adressing 3)

the quetion is can anyone point me in the direction of a technical genius? I am willing to pay fairly mental money, if anyone knows anyone who knows anyone..

Well my guess is that it depends on how the address lines are connected. I'm sure if it was a software limit e-mu would have raised the limit themsleves as memory became cheaper.
Tbh, I think anyone with the knowledge and inclination to spend their days tracing address lines and trying to modify the emu motherboard would want a fairly hefty hourly rate, and thus it would be cheaper to go out and get yourself one of the latest mpc's or some such thing.

Additionally, it has occurred to me that the emu's take 72pin memory, and the biggest I have been able to google is 256MB, so using the built-in slots would only give you 512MB. I suppose you could build an adapter of some sort, but it just seems to get more and more complicated... at the end of the day I think there are easier and cheaper solutions to getting more sample ram, such as buying more samplers or putting together an rack-mounted PC with a top end soundcard and the Emulator X software.

yes true, but I have an esynth ultra, with rfx32,adat etc etc musch better than a pc (which i have)..shame about the memory, it would be beast..

We definitely need a reverse-engineer-geek to think on that subject ! I'll be in heaven if I could use my e6400 Ultra with 512Mb
In my opinion there is still no hardware (except perhaps few ones like Oasys, VSynthXT) that can compete with an Emu with Rfx32 (at least for the sampling+synthesis part. I know those devices embed vocoders etc. But who cares ? If i'd like to vocode, I'll buy a vocoder )

I'd give a few hundreds of $ for such a mod
Unfortunately I guess the mod is quite impossible to realize now ... if only E-mu had open-sourced the e6400 (and others) architecture ...

whats wrong with the rfx-32 vocooder?

put it this way if some genius could put a gig of ram in id pay them 500 english pounds..

Ok guys, Ive emailed a couple of self-described computing genius's..lets see..!

katzinhatz wrote:put it this way if some genius could put a gig of ram in id pay them 500 english pounds..

Make it 500 Euros and you're on!


Seriously tho, where I work we do software embedded in hardware and work with Coldfire processors - what you're asking is highly specialised when compared to PC stuff, so 500 quid won't get you more than a few hours work if they're worth their salt.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see the e-mu get developed further, but I think we need to accept our samplers for what they are now, to face the fact that it is highly unlikely they will ever change.

However, there is nothing stopping you routing other audio sources thru the RFX using the adat and extra input cards, and giving your other gear the emu treatment - I have recently got myself a VP-9000 for ?175, so I have another 128MB of sample ram with realtime time stretching etc, and I also run an orbit 3 thru it, so I can have sounds with 2 filters on them.

Jus my thoughts!

sounds interesting stu, tbh id pay a thousand, but i guess it wouldnt make much difference

When considering the memory address space, its not just RAM, but anything else that may be memory mapped into the address space

e.g.
Mapped memory I/O devices (e.g. RFX ? ADAT?)
Flash Memory


The Emu has this processor
* Motorola 5206e ColdFire RISC 32-bit processor, faster SCSI, DSP, MIDI and operation.



According to the Moto Coldfire specs, the processors in these beasts has a 32bit INTERNAL memory bus.

Externally it can address up to 256M of additional off chip RAM.

sca.uwaterloo.ca/coldfire/ftp/mot/Utilities/cf5206pb.pdf

However, you'd have to rewrite the software to know about the extra RAM mostly likely, a tall order indeed in addition to determining why the extra address line(s) aren't used.

Not worth the effort. Easier to buy a second Emu if you really want to "expand" and if you need longer sample times, go Soft sampler.

M

It's not just a hardware issue. I believe EOS would have to be modified to be able to address the additional RAM. Good Luck.

Regards
James

never got a reply from any of the 'genius's I contacted

Bah humbug

get another emu sampler. theyre cheap as hell

Yeah. could do, much nicer to have lots of memory though