ho hum. dug, it looks like you & me both got shafted. I am in correspondence with emu "tech support" over this to the tune of several long e-mails & about $50/worth of 'phone-time.
has ANYONE EVER made this work???
yeah, basically the blank flash comes in two sizes for burning-&-using-in-a-proteus; 16Mb & 32Mb on a single stick.
ok, here goes. long post, this....
the idea is, you make a bank in y'r ultra & when you're done, you "author" it across to the blank flash-simm. the flash has to be in the right slot (rom 0) & you must have the regular ram only in slot b. this is all in the authoring guide on emu's site, btw, which lurks amongst the lit for the ultra machines, v4.10 or above.
you CAN have a blank & a factory rom onboard in the next slot (see later) & even clone the factory rom, or one you've made y'rself, onto the flash in slot 0 (hidden feature?), but not two blanks at once.
when (IF...) you succeed, the eos presets have turned into proteus instruments, & retain just the basic attributes- velocity & keyboard placements, tuning, pan & looping. any other eos preset stuff is ignored by the proteus, which has it's own corner of the flash into which it will eventually write proper proteus presets. (the synth architecture is quite different from the sampler).
but meanwhile the EOS preset data is there too. same rules apply as for a regular disc bank- you can think of the rom as being a hard-drive with one bank on it. same number of samples, presets, the works.
as to how this behaves in real-life... I don't know yet. I think the idea is that the ultra can wake up ready-to-play, with the rom bank "loading" instantly. but I don't know where this leaves you w.r.t. the ram bank....
but so anyway.
I have the exact same thing, & emu say "The speculation is that the rom chips are bad".
what I got was "flash program error" a few minutes after starting the process.
upon examining the flash in the disc browser, I could see a default folder, a default bank & a correct&complete listing of the samples I was burning. but only the first sample would audition, & it was corrupted.
I wrote all this to emu, along with all the data displays about the duff samples (they have negative durations & suchlike).
it's obvious to me, though, that the ultra is fucking up the directory it needs to find stuff on the flash- the sample headers, if you like, & that this prevents it booting because it gets stuck trying to read what's in it. EOS is notoriously intolerant of interruptions to it's routines.
one small difference- I managed to fuck up two of my three flash roms like this, so that the ultra no longer boots past "mounting IDE drive" with either of them present. but /before/ I rebooted the ultra with the third fucked-up flash in it, I went into diagnostics (1358) & dicked around with the flash menu items.... "checksum" tells me the flash is all good....
there's more... this menu has a duplicate-rom utility.... so....
attempting to duplicate the other (empty) rom slot onto my flash simm, I managed to undo whatever corruption was stopping the ultra from booting with this flash onboard.
you get the same "erasing flash (~9 min.)..." as during authoring, but then you get "copying progamming (~18 min.).." which aborts because there's nothing to copy.
**after this the ultra will boot ok with the blank still in it.** i.e. back to square one.
& so later I managed to "clone" my protozoa rom into the flash, & the ultra could read samples off of it! so the flash was probably all fine, is my point.
my pk6 & p2k still don't see anything when I put the flash into them... this suggests to me that the bit of flash that tells a /proteus/ how to address the samples is bad, or being written bad by the ultra.
y'see, duplicating a rom into flash using the copy routine in diagnostics will create a rom suitable for use in EOS, same as putting in a factory rom; the sample headers are being written to a different part of the flash, by a different bit of code (& all you can access is the raw samples- any presets you make out of them will have to live in ram & be stored on HD).
but somehow this process will also undo the damage created elsewhere by the authoring routine.
I am waiting for emu to get back to me, either for solution or refund. how did they leave things with you? they are taking me quite seriously at the moment, but only because I copied in their sales department & made noises about how much emu kit I have bought. they asked me where I got the flash from, like I might have bought it from pc-world or something!
I told them to ask lynne buck. this shit has cost me over a grand in flash simms that don't work, not to mention the money I spent on getting together the hardware so's I could do this.....
I'll keep y's all posted.
duncan.