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

On 10/02/2019 10:24, ricard2010@... [xl7] wrote:

> It struck me that E-Loader is actually written in Java, so perhaps
> it would work on a modern machine. I dug into the installation 
> directory and copied it all to a Linux machine (which is what I 
> normally used) and started the application. It actually ran without 
> any errors. However, I couldn't get it to recognize any MIDI ports, 
> perhaps not surprising, as despite the standardization of Java it 
> would most likely have been done very differently in Windws 98 than 
> today. Still, since there are no error messages, it seems as if it's 
> not expecting something that it cannot find in the environment. 
> Without MIDI connectivity it's pretty useless though of course.

The E-loader app pre-dates the addition of javax.sound.midi to J2SE.

It therefore uses a separate DLL (using JNI to add native
code to Java apps) to gain access to the MIDI ports.

> Has anyone else attempted this, or have some Java experience that 
> would help this getting going?

For the firmware updater I did start to look at whether it would be
feasible to replace the JNI DLL with calls to javax.sound.midi but it
turned out to be easier to write a new tool.

> On this topic, I find it strange that the XL-7 has functions in the 
> MIDI menu to dump patches, but not sequences. E-Loader dumps them as 
> standard midi (.mid) files, so I expect the format would be pretty 
> standard. Haven't dug into it at all though, just taking a top level 
> approach for now.

I suspect that sequences are exchanged using MIDI file dump messages, 
which is fine if you've got E-Loader, but is generally not supported by 
generic sysex librarians.

> I saw someone in the P2K group had written a web based tool for 
> firmware upgrading, so that's a starting point too.


Steve wrote:
> Perhaps someone (maybe Ray?) will write a user interface to 
> upload/download patterns/songs using webmidi.  Or perhaps someone 
> with coding experience would want to write a standalone program.
> I'd be willing to contribute thoughts and research if it would help.
> IIRC the midi sequence dump requests are pretty straight forward.

I'd consider it, but I don't have a P2500 or XP-7 to test with.

Ray