Emax

Is it my imagination or are internal EMU parts getting extremely hard to come by?

Mine went on the bllink over something simple yesterday and I was shopping

local techs who mostly said they couldn't or wouldn't do the work.

Luckily for me, Ted was kind enough to take a look at mine when it stopped reading from the SCSI bus..

As far as parts, where would we go if we needed replacements? Old junk units like the one being sold from a member who just listed in on eBay UK?

I will take a wild swing and assume the analog filters used on EMU are Curtis and not some other proprietary....also....

the EEPROMS...how do you know if they have gone bad? and if you are skilled enough to determine one indeed went, and you need the EEPROMS replaced you will have to find someone with the ability to 'blow ' a new one using the original code off the bad one if it isn't already fried and lost its 1's and 0's. That being said someone needs to figure out a way to find replacement blank EEPROMS then blow the code on them so we have backups for the future....It would certainly help.....

As far as the mobo, its find an old one, right? Aside from the obviouls 'burn through' you will get with some, not all trace burns are obvious... and if you do find the bad trace you better be a damned good soldering man who can work PCB's -this is where the original schematics would come in handy...which I am sure are readily available...needless to say, all time consuming and by the time you ared done, makes you an bona fide EMU repair guy....get good at this and you would have a nice side business stocking up old emu EEPROMS/parts/filters/mobos etc.....the thing is, with the EEPROMS you just gotta get the burner for it and learn how to burn em right?

As far as the FDD..they are extremely hard to find /long in the tooth...how do you repair yours...do you HAVE to find a replacement FDD if it goes bad? . Nowhere is thi smore true than on the earlier EMU units...you actually need to find someone that can (or is willing to) repair and recalibrate the 5-1/4 inch FDD on most of the early EMU units. As far as the 3-1/2" for the Emax I and onward, mine works but only reads disks that it writes; it won't read any others...how do I get it 'calibrated' back so it will read disks other FDD's write?

If I am not mistaken there is a special proprietary boot sector read/write schema that EMU used for their FDD's, correct?. Any new replacement FDD drop in must be calibrated to the same if it is not a New Old Stock FDD, correct?

Feel free to chime in

Cheers and happy music making!