emusonacid! legacy

dave-
while we're clarifying-

-I'm still preparing the banks to put onto zip to send to you, & I sincerely thank you for undertaking to crack this issue for me, but I have had to divert time & effort away as I have a trip to the US coming up & needed to make other keyboard arrangements in the absence of flash-simm-success. so I'll be sending the bits soon. I may even box up the e5k & let you have a look at that too. don't need it except for this op, as I also have e4x, esi4k & two esi32s.
(my favourite sampler, though, is my prophet 2002. 12-bit & analogue processing )

-I have been dealing directly with emu support in the US because I bought the parts directly from them, & the support guys were on hand when I first raised the issue with lynne in sales. I've been in the habit of buying direct like this because a) UK & european dealer markups on roms &c are ridiculous & b) because things like the audity extreme rom simply weren't available from anywhere else.
to give an example- the only dealer that even listed the blank roms (the ones I've had all the trouble with) had the 16Mb version listed at ?300.

-I have had, shall we say, some difficulties getting questions dealt with by the scottish office in the past. as a broadcast engineer, I am in the habit of going direct to the source for answers whenever possible. it seems on this occasion that I overestimated the capabilities of the US support team, who seemed slow to grasp the nature of my issue, whilst at the same time underestimating the strength of the non-US support. I do remember, however, that mike barnes was very helpful when I got my first esi32.

-I may seem disgruntled when posting to this forum on this topic, but that's because I've spent a lot of money & effort on this project & have been frustrated every step of the way. especially, I'm concerned that I haven't seen or heard of any evidence of this technique actually working; I sort of half-expected emu-US to have pre-populated at least one of the replacement simms with /proteus/ data, just to reassure me. instead, they told me they'd performed the operation successfully & then (for reasons unknown) replaced the data with a cloned rom bank, readable on my e5k but not visible to a proteus box.

can you see why I'd get a little cynical? & for all the expertise gathered here & elsewhere in cyberspace, I can find no account of this technique being used successfully.
anyway. tomorrow's friday, & then it's the weekend.

duncan/r.m.i.

Below is a copy of an email E-MU tech support sent to Duncan Goddard regarding this problem.

Hi Duncan.

We here at E-MU US and abroad have been reading your posts on the emu's on acid forum.
Frankly we're a little perplexed. It certainly is a unique way for us to get updates from you.

We have pulled in engineers, product managers, and more then one senior tech support rep. onto this problem to help resolve it.
And based on our findings after doing very extensive testing as I have discussed personally with you via email, their appears to be a problem with either the bank you are saving or your sampler itself. I thought we had made this clear. If not- our apologies.

Thus until we get the data in question at a minimum and perhaps the sampler, E-MU can do no more.

For your problem we have tested 6 separate ROMs under the authoring process across several Ultra samplers- and each have worked perfectly. Three of these we have sent to you and you have reported the same problem. Hopefully you can see why we cannot keep sending you fully tested ROMs when the problem appears to be specific to your data or machine. For the record we have many customers having no problems with ROM authoring.

However your posts seem to imply that E-MU has failed you in a gross manner. What more could we do in this situation? Clearly sending you more ROMs will not solve this since we are confident at this time that the ROMs are not the problem.

We respect anyone's right to say anything they wish on a forum regardless of accuracy. It is a common practice for better or worse and we've been around way too long to take any of this personally. But frankly we were somewhat surpised at your responses given the level of support we have provided for this problem that is specific to your machine or data. Hopefully you can understand our difficulties when we troubleshoot a problem that we cannot reproduce here at the factory.

Regards,
Max Mobley
E-MU Systems, Inc.

Hopefully you can understand our difficulties when we troubleshoot a problem that we cannot reproduce here at the factory.

Hi Max, just out of interest, did you manage to reproduce the RFX/4.7 Noiseburst problem in the factory and if so what did you do to troubleshoot the problem?

Soz to jump thread topic

Yes of course we have this bug well documented and it is currently being researched and troubleshooted at the engineering level.

Now for the record E-MU support personel are regularly lurking on these groups but will not post unless we feel we need to for the sake of accuracy.

So out of politeness I responded to your RFX inquiry which should be common knowledge as the PM for that product does post regularly.

However please don't feel slighted in anyway when you see E-MU support not posting to general comments or topics already addressed by E-MU management in public forums. This is not the offical forum to seek responses from E-MU technical support and any posts here from E-MU support personel will be the exception not the norm.

If you wish to contact E-MU technical support for any E-MU support related reason please don't hesitate to contact us:
http://www.emu.com/support/custsup.asp

Thanks,
Max

time for an update.
this week I took a big chance ($$-wise) & bought an e6400 ultra. nice sampler... can't quite figure out what makes it different than my e5000 ultra, but doubtless I'll discover something eventually. well, that is to say, besides one important difference: it actually makes it all the way through writing proteus type data onto the flash simms.
if anyone else is trying to do this, get in touch off-list, & maybe I'd be able to help. there are some gotchas. the instructions say this will work with 4.10 on up. it won't. the sampler doesn't even know what a flash simm is at 4.10, & the best it can do is read it like it was a rom. in any case, the presence of the flash simm in a rom slot makes the sampler pause for a long time while it's booting, & those of us that have seen an emu hang before would be forgiven for thinking (as I did with my e5000) that it was never going to boot. be patient. be more patient than I was six months back.
who knows, maybe my e5k is alright after all....

duncan.