[sdiy] Ensoniq ASR-X weirdness

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

I forgot to mention that Ensoniq did not strictly use DOS formatting, at least not for the EPS. You can sometimes read an ENSONIQ floppy from DOS, but there is one extra sector per track, so the disk holds more data. Also, the format is entirely unlike DOS, so you need a special program to read the data.

I wrote such a program for my NeXT Computer back in the days when my EPS saw daily use. That allowed any SCSI device (hard drive, floppy, Zip, etc) to be read in the Ensoniq format, and allowed transferring files between Ensoniq and other devices. But you can't read an EPS disk with standard formatting.

I suspect that you have SCSI termination issues. Once you solve those, you should be able to format a disk so that the ASR-X can read it. If you get the Chicken Head software that others have mentioned, this should allow you to read Ensoniq disks from your PC.

Brian


On Dec 1, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Travis Thatcher <recompas at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've got a terminator and a scsi cd drive I can try on the end of the
> chain tomorrow. I think it is weird that even if I insert a brand new
> pc formatted zip disk the status still says 'Unreadable'. I thought
> the ASR-X used DOS formatting... I may just give up in the end and get
> an sd floppy emulator. I don't plan on putting huge samples on this
> thing but it'd be nice to have the larger storage option.
>