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HARD DISK SUPPLEMENT
© 1985, 1986, 1987 E-mu Systems, Inc. Page 150
BACKGROUND : WHY HARD DISKS
The standard Emulator II comes with two floppy disk drives for saving and loading Bank
information. Replacing the second floppy drive with a Hard Disk drive offers two big advantages:
Greater storage. The Hard Disk holds 46 Banks, the floppy 1 Bank.
Faster access time. A Bank can be saved from the Emulator II to the Hard Disk in 4
seconds (as opposed to 1 minute for saving to a floppy), or loaded from the Hard Disk to
the Emulator II in 2 seconds (as opposed to approximately 30 seconds for loading from a
floppy).
What this means is that you can have a large library of banks stored in the Hard Disk, and that
any of these Banks can be loaded into the Emulator II almost instantaneously.
That’s the good news, but there is a catch:
Hard disks are fragile.
Dropping an Emulator II with
the power on will probably destroy the Hard Disk. Furthermore, in tests conducted at the factory,
hard disk failures would occur if the Emulator II was dropped from heights of as little as 8 inches
even with power off.
CAUTION:
Hard Disk owners are boldly going where few have gone before. Hard disks in
general inhabit safe, predictable computer installations where they lead a climate-controlled life
free of the perils of a rock and roll band on the road. Although some portable computers do
include hard disks, these are usually treated with kid gloves compared to music gear.
E-mu’s durability tests for Hard Disk equipped Emulator II’s have been positive, and so we are
making the Hard Disk available as an option. Studio musicians will appreciate having 46 Banks
“on-call” at all times, and touring performers will enjoy not having to deal with the 30 second
Bank load time for floppies.
Please note, however, that we are offering the hard disk for experimental usage only and cannot
be responsible for any losses or damages, including consequential losses or damages, due to
Hard Disk failures.
THE HARD DISK PERSONALITY
In most cases, you can treat the Hard Disk just like a super-floppy; transferring data to and from
the Emulator II is straightforward.
However, over time the Hard Disk can develop errors (particularly if system abuse occurs). This
is analogous to what happens if you play a record over and over and over again, and eventually,
a pop or scratch develops. In fact, just like records that come with a scratch or two, many brand
new Hard Disks already have errors when they’re shipped. This usually makes people cringe -
what, buy a product with known defects?!? But consider that a typical Hard Disk holds
20,000,000 bytes of data. If a few bytes are missing here and there, no big deal you still have
plenty of bytes left over. All you need to do is instruct the computer not to write data over the
bad bytes, and all is well.
Any new hard disk will come with an error log that contains a list of all known errors; this
information, along with operating system software necessary to format the Hard Disk, is stored
Summary of Contents for EII+
Page 11: ...INTRODUCTION 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 11 INTRODUCTION ...
Page 20: ...INTRODUCTION 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 20 ...
Page 26: ...THE GUIDED TOURS 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 26 THE GUIDED TOURS ...
Page 84: ...VOICE DEFINITION MODULE 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 84 Fig VDEF 8 Fig VDEF 9 ...
Page 118: ...PRESET DEFINITION MODULE 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 118 ...
Page 168: ...ENTER MODULE 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 168 ENTER MODULE ...
Page 214: ...SMPTE SUPPLEMENT 1985 1986 1987 E mu Systems Inc Page 214 SMPTE SUPPLEMENT OVERVIEW PROTOCOL ...