Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

>>While researching E-Mu Flas ROMS I ran across the following (from 
2005) on another board.  Does anyone know anything about this?<<

steve- I've seen this correspondence too, & I may even have taken part
in it. I have a bit of history with the emu flash rom authoring thing
(see "emus on acid" forum for the whole story) which eventually worked
out fine... all emu ultra samplers are not created equal, it seems, &
the long & the short of it is to make sure you get a lump of hardware
(never mind the right version of EOS) that can actually perform the
burn. so I have an v4.7 e5k ultra here that works in every other
respect but cannot author flash roms. my e6400ultra does it fine.

anyway- back to the plot. I too have seen one or two of the later
factory roms that appear to be flash roms- either they look similar
physically or they actually have "emu flash sound rom 32Mb" or
somesuch printed on them.
they aren't. they don't.
I have a "composer" set here that I got in a pk6; it looked very like
the flash sticks I have elsewhere, & since I already had the composer
set twice, I tried to burn over it. 
it doesn't work.
curiously, the sampler boots & says "flash rom installed", & the rom
appears in the disc menu with the flash rom icon. there the similarity
ends. I forget the error message- will report on this again if you're
sufficiently curious.
 
same deal with the audity expansion I eventually extracted from emu.
(since this set is so hard to get hold of, I decided to copy it into
my sampler- which worked fine- & then re-author it onto itself. the
sampler refused. the rom survived intact.)

there is something- a small but significant chip- on the "real" flash
roms that is absent from the "leftover" flash roms emu were shipping
towards the end of their hardware days. 
somewhere out there on another forum are jpegs of the three distinct
roms I have encountered- the "real" factory roms, the "real" factory
flash rom that can be authored in an ultra & which will work in the
proteus chassis models, & this third sort (which comes in several
shapes but is basically the same) which seems to be flash rom with one
of the chips missing.
again, I can probably unearth these pics if you are really curious
about this. 
maybe emu were using these instead of getting "real" roms made because
they weren't making the roms in such big numbers anymore. I don't know. 
what I do know is that there is a premium on any of this stuff right
now. I got three 32Mb flash sticks right at the death, & consider
myself fortunate. there are other emu roms I wish I could erase & burn
over, but sadly it doesn't appear to work like that.
hth-
duncan/r.m.i.