Rhodes Chroma Polaris

Howdy, so there's this problem my polaris has always had.  I tried to do a bit of reading on this, but basically my polaris randomly freezes and when it is rebooted I've lost a random amount of patches that have been reset to the default patch.  Sometimes it will stay on for hours and be fine, but I never get to keep sounds on the thing because of this issue.

What do you guys recommend, replace the eproms and ram chips?  I see this recommended often for freezing polarises but never quite seen anyone report back that this fixed their problems.  My power lines seem fine and the DC ok setting has been adjusted.  Any advice would be appreciated.

Regards
Greg C.

> From: Greg C.
>
> Howdy, so there's this problem my polaris has always had. I
> tried to do a bit of reading on this, but basically my
> polaris randomly freezes and when it is rebooted I've lost a
> random amount of patches that have been reset to the default
> patch. Sometimes it will stay on for hours and be fine, but
> I never get to keep sounds on the thing because of this issue.
>
> What do you guys recommend, replace the eproms and ram chips?
> I see this recommended often for freezing polarises but
> never quite seen anyone report back that this fixed their
> problems. My power lines seem fine and the DC ok setting has
> been adjusted. Any advice would be appreciated.

You might try partially unseating and then reseating various chips, to make sure the connections in the sockets are clean. Just pry them up a little and push them back down. Can't hurt to do this to all the chips in the CPU section.

It's also possible that the EPROMs are fading. If you have access to an EPROM eraser and programmer, you can reprogram them, using the files on the RhodesChroma.com site.

It would also be nice to know if there's any significant ripple on the supplies, especially the digital +5V. Do you have access to a scope? Sometimes they look good on a meter, but are noisy.

--

Ciao, Paul D. DeRocco
Paul mailto:pderocco@...

Hi Paul,  Thanks for the suggestions.  Last night I partially lifted each of the ram and CPU related ICs, I’ll keep an eye on it over the next few days to determine if this indeed worked.  It was looking promising since I had it on for several hours with no memory loss.. fingers crossed.