I am old…
Back in the eighties I was super impressed by the latest sampler technologies, especially the three companies AKAI, Ensoniq and EMU Systems
Unfortunately they were both expensive and noisy, not least thanks to the internal SCSI disks they carried.
So I never really could afford to buy them, so time passed and samplers went out of fashion…
Well, not so long ago I found out that some talented people have built SCSI / SD solutions that are both cheap and easy to work with, at the same time that samplers have become cheap and now I’m back in the eighties, with a twist.
I found the BlueSCSI solution here : https://bluescsi.com it’s really easy to setup and works like a charm.
The next challenge was to get hold on the good old and well designed sound libraries from EMU / AKAI / ENSONIQ etc.
I was searching and discovered that all the nice software was made for the old systems from the past, leaving us stuck in the present…
Thanks to the AI coding software opencode I managed to make a windows application that read EMU E6400 CD ROM images.
You can download the Windows version EMU E6400 CD ROM Reader here
This is a Windows 11 64bit application, it will possibly run on Windows 10/64 as well.
After extraction, you can load the banks into the EMU / Creative Labs Emulator X3 Application, it works like a charm ( I haven’t tested I that extensively yet ) so far 🙂
And here is the OS X EMU E6400 CD ROM Reader, it was built on a Mac mini M2 Pro Silicon so it will probably not not on Intel Macs
It can extract EMU Sampler banks to a selected folder and you can then load them into Emulator X3 software or put them onto you BlueSCSI or similar.
I also bought a couple of Gotek Floppy emulators and flashed them with the open source Flash Floppy firmware : https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
this one requires a bit of geeking around, but it’s not that hard ( as even an old dude as myself can do it…)
I bought a couple of EMU Systems E6400’s, as I am deeply in love with these machines, great hardware builds, and the software is a breeze to navigate and use, too bad that both EMU and Ensoniq was bought and buried by Creative Labs, not that creative after all…
I refitted the E6400’s with a BlueSCSI and a Gotek and in one of the E6400’s and I also replaced the rather noisy 40mm stock fans with a Noctua NF-A4x20 FLX fan
so the machine are now almost noiseless, and loading banks and samples is a breeze.
I also made a 3D model for the BlueScsi V2. so I could fit it into one of the option slots in a EMU E6400 sampler
The model is here :
EMU E6400 Option Slot Combo.
Furthermore, I made the model so it also fits into the Floppy mount in the front of The E6400, for this I need to trick the sampler to “believe” that a floppy drive is present, while its not, this save me a fair amount of loading time when the sampler is looking for the floppy drive.
This trick is simple, cap the following jumpers on the floppy connector :
9-10
15-16
25-26
31-32
