I would think that CMI-3 board repair could be a fairly lucrative sideline to compliment someone's main job. There are many of us who would pay a good price to have a board repaired as it is imperative to keeping the system running. I would pay £ 100.00 - £ 150.00 to have a faulty CMI-28 board repaired. This board seems to fail a lot and I think I have about 3 faulty CMI-28 boards ( rev 5.1 I believe ). The CMI 2X's will last forever I am sure but the CMI series 3 is a different matter. There is a market there. Jo Britt recently produced a run of CMI-2X USB boxes so that you can use a USB mouse and TFT screen instead of the lightpen and old green screen monitor. They sold out immediately and there is demand for more. The speed improvement using a USB mouse as compared with the lightpen is brilliant. Using the whole CMI 2X is so much fluid now. The lightpen looks great and this can still be used as well as the USB mouse. Perhaps the recently established Fairlight Instruments could provide a CMI-3 board repair service alongside their i-Pad and CMI-30A products ?
Cheers,
James
Magic Audio Co
Any Sound in Theory and in Practice
Studio 26
The Coach House
2 Upper York Street
Bristol BS2 8QN
U.K.
studio direct line: +44 (0)117 370 5810
mobile: +44 (0)7711 031 615
email: jamesthomson@mac.com
On 17 Feb 2011, at 09:45, Joe Sleator wrote:
> I haven't found anyone who can repair the series 3 cards.> It's really a shame that these amazing instruments are not supported.OK, let's assume they were supported, and very well, better than even a 2 year old Nokia phone, or a 69 MG Midget, or that old Russian space suit I can't get parts for any longer. :-DLets say you could fedex the card to a company, and they would either repair or replace the card, to good as new, with 90 day warranty, or return it to you and refund your shipping if it could not be repaired or replaced for whatever reason. Zero risk to you. And that company would even pay you for your broken boards if you decided not to get them shipped back.What would that be worth, lets say, for a CMI28? Go on and quote me a price in any currency you'd care to. And how many paid Series III board repairs do you reckon would come in per year? Not the sum-total of broken CMI boards, mind you, but just the ones people wanted repaired enough to pay.JoeOn Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Gmail <jamesthomson9@googlemail.com> ;wrote:Hi Arron,
This error message that you are getting is caused by a faulty CMI-28 card. ;I had the exact same error but was fortunate to have a spare card. It would be great if there was someone with the series 3 knowledge to repair these cards. There are people who can repair the CMI-2X cards but I haven't found anyone who can repair the series 3 cards. It's really a shame that these amazing instruments are not supported.Cheers,JamesOn 16 Feb 2011, at 20:12, Joe Sleator wrote:Hi, Arron
First guess is it's falling over where it asks if the Midi Processor (CMI28) is present, by poking and reading from its peripheral address, and the midi processor either does not reply, or says something stoopid.Whilst the IIx would boot happily in this configuration, i.e with no CMI28, all the III software releases I'm aware of are fairly tightly bound to the CMI28, as it does most of the work triggering the sounds via the channel cards. See if you can get your hands on a spare CMI28 would be my next goal. You might just be able to re-seat the ROMS and RAMS and the 68K in their sockets, being careful of the pins. Usually it's enough to pop a tiny screwdriver under one end, lift the chip slightly, and then squish it back down. There must be someone else in your neck of the woods with either a IIx or a series III.IF YOU TAKE CMI28 OUT BE SURE YOU ARE EARTHED ESPECIALLY IF IT's WINTERTIME AND THE HEAT IS ON IN YOUR PLACE BEFORE TOUCHING THE CHIPS DIRECTLY. I can't stress this enough, many times boards are degraded or die outright from miniscule ~5KV or less, static discharges and it's totally avoidable.If the ROMS have suffered bit-rot (you can tell by reading them out and comparing to known good roms) they can fairly easily be replaced, or erased and re-programmed.The other way to tell is to slot roms from a working CMI28 into the suss board and re-try.The roms, rams, and 68K chip are all socketed. A resourceful soul can find replacements for all these chips by poking around. Virtually all the other chips on the CMI28 are common TTL or early motorola LSI, so also should be obtainable, however finding what's gone bad is the challenge.Since the Series III diagnostics do virtually the same thing as mptask, I don't think they'd shed much more light, but probably worth a try.Good luck.JoeHi all,
Thanks for all you assistance so far. Just thought Id report back :)
So : I got a replacement CMI32 card from the ever helpful Peter Wielk and great now when I boot, i can see all my channel cards, memory etc.
The system runs right the way though its boot-up sequence, but just as its about to start, the system exits to the command prompt with
mptask handshake timeout : aborting process.
does anyone know where I could start looking next to get a bit further ?
I looked on the KMI website, and it says that mptask controls all the realtime events in the CMI. (if Im understanding it right)
Also : when I boot up : the status display says that no sync card is present : what does this refer to, and is this part of my my problem ?
Any hints or clues appreciated as normal :)
Best wishes : Arron