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Emulator II: Upgrades & Add Ons
Diskette Drives The
Emulator II could be upgraded from one to two diskette drives, for around $650. If you can find a second diskette drive - it is easy enough to fit, although you will need a second drive cable and the jumpers on the drive need setting
up correctly. The ids of each drive are different, the upper drive is 0 and the lower drive is 1.
Hard Drive The Emulator II+ HD came with an internal Hard Drive (Miniscribe 8425) which could hold 46 sample banks. It required extra circuitry and a new operating system version (HD). It is not
possible to install a hard drive into the EII or EII+, without the hardware upgrade. The external multi pin connector on the back of the EII is NOT SCSI, but a RS422/RS232 for connecting a Mac, CDROM or terminal.
Only specific disk
drives can be used with the EII. We have only seen LaPine 10 MB and Miniscribe 20 MB used. The EII uses an in-house SCSI contrioller card, which is then converted to an ST506 interface protocol to access the MFM encoded Miniscribe 8425
hard drive by an Aaptec ACB-4000 card. The EII SCSI commands are in the OS and are specific to the hard drive. You cannot use other SCSI drives like a ZIP100 with the EII (we have tried!).
Hard Drive Upgrade The Emulator II and II+ could be upgraded with an internal Hard Drive (Miniscribe 8425), full details are
in the following documents. Many of the parts can still be obtained but you'll need the new boot ROM, and you'll need to construct the E-mu controller PCB.
Memory From January 1985 the
standard 512 Kbytes of memory could be upgraded to 2 banks of 512 Kbytes, by replacing half of the 64 x 64k bit DRAM chips with 32 x 256k bit DRAM chips.
Vesrion 0 digital boards need a wiring kludge which involves cutting tracks
and adding wiring. However digital board version 1 does not need any wiring changes. Both boards need a couple of new control chips, and the EII+ OS (diskette and EPROM). The piggyback memory board is ditched and a jumper setting needs to
be changed.
The EII+ upgrade is still possible to achieve, especially if you have the Rev 1 digital board. We can supply the new Boot ROM.
Computer Editing Digidesign developed software for the Mac, called Sound Designer for the Emulator II. This allows visual
editing of the EII samples and remote control.
 CDROM Optical Media International made a CD-ROM player for the EII which plugged in via the RS422 connection. It was announced in January 1986, at Winter NAMM (and sold for
£1500). Two versions were available; The biege CDS3 external drive, and the purple and black ProCDP rack mount. The Emulator II was the first sampler to be supported by OMI and they used very early Sony CDROM drives with an added
serial interface. They are sadly no longer manufactured.
OMI created a three volume Universe of Sounds CDROM library in conjunction with E-mu Systems and Northstar, it covers over 1500 samples. These are very high quality samples.
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3.5" Floppy Drive
The Emulator II uses 5.25" floppy drives, which are well past their designed life span. Replacement drives are no longer manufactured, and 5.25" DS/DD media is now
hard to find, and less reliable than 3.5" diskettes. 
* EII+ HD Upgrade
* Emulator II Hard Disk 
* 3.5" Floppy Drive Kit 
