Emax

As some people complained about the incompatibility of EMXP-formatted 
floppy disks with some EMAX machines, especially EMAX-I / SE, I've 
done some tests myself today.
I could use an EMAX-SE sampler for half an hour.
I had two almost identical floppies with me:
- the first one was formatted by EMX (MS-DOS 6.22)
- the other one was formatted by EMXP (XP Home SP1)
Both contained the EMAX-SE OS and the ZD701 arco strings bank.

The EMAX-SE had problems with *both disks* ! 
I booted it approx. 20 times, 10 times with each disk:
- the boot was *never* successful with the EMX formatted disk (!)
- the boot was 4 times succesful with the EMXP formatted disk, the 
other 6 times it failed too.

Once booted and the OS loaded, everything worked fine, although 
reading a bank from the EMX disk sometimes resulted in some corrupted 
presets.
During testing I also received some error messages like "disk not 
formatted" and some faulty characters on the display (again, 
especially when loading a bank from the EMX formatted disk).

The EMAX-SE was in good shape but hadn't been used for some months.

The very same 2 disks (but with another OS written to it) work 
perfectly fine on my EMAX-II machines.

Conclusion: I guess the trouble is caused by the age or by the type 
of the floppy drive in some EMAX machines. As my test indicated that 
EMX formatted disks also cause problems, I'm afraid I will not be 
able to "correct" the EMXP software.
Either I simply don't have the right specifications (the same ones 
used in EMX) or these specifications are not 100% compatible with all 
drives used in EMAX samplers.

So the menu topic in EMXP will be changed from "Format an EMAX disk" 
into "Try to format an EMAX disk" :-)

I guess the safest format-function is the one used by the EMAX 
samplers themselves.


Regards,

///E-Synthesist