Emax : Upgrades and Add Ons

Factory Upgrades The E-mu Systems factory no longer provide upgrades, and users are to a large degree on their own, with no third party support. Except from us!

The main upgrade you want to aim for is external SCSI, that way you can use a ZIP100 drive. You will need a later model Emax to work with, one with the SE operating system and preferably one with a Version 3 digital board.

Memory The Emax comes with 512 Kbytes of memory, which can in NO way can be expanded. The memory addressing chips are limited to accessing 512 Kbytes.

Operating Systems The big OS upgrade for Emax owners is the SE release. Trouble is that this was a copy protected release and it isn't a matter of just booting up with an SE OS diskette. You need the original SE upgrade diskette - which works only once and updates an internal EEPROM. It is therefore currently impossible to upgrade to SE.

Internal Hard Disk The Emax hard disk is SCSI so your Emax must support SCSI before you can add an internal hard disk. The drive must be a Miniscribe (later Maxtor) 8425S, which gives you 20 MB of storage. This drive is often found in Mac II's as well, if you need one. We suggest you forget using a hard disk as they are unreliabl;e and noisy, and use an external ZIP100 SCSI drive which is easy to find secondhand and much moer convenient.

Storage Limitations 20 MB is the maximum disk space an Emax can format, this gives a total of 36 banks. Some makes of hard disk will format but not spin up in time to be the boot drive, but they can be used as data storage. The Emax can be used with the Rodime RO652 20 MB drive, it is slightly slower on sample loads and very rare now.

External SCSI By far the best upgrade to get for an Emax is external SCSI. HD model Emax's do not have an external SCSI connector as standard, and it wasn't until the Plus model was released in 1989 that an external SCSI connector featured on an Emax. E-mu also provided Plus upgrades for existing owners for $195 but you need the right CPU board (later versions - 2 and 3), and the Emax SE upgrade. Full details on this exciting upgrade, and the appropriate SCSI manuals, are on this web page. more »

Iomega Zip 100 Drives These drives work very well with the an Emax with either internal or external SCSI. Remember that only 20 MB (36 banks) can be formatted), more »

Hyperflex Removable Drive Before the days of Iomega or even Syquest - there was Data Technologies Hyperflex. E-mu Systems sold this SCSI 20 MB removable drive via the usual music stores, for $1395. But buyers had to contend with removable disks that would work for about 2 months then the media would flake off or go bad. The disks were a reasonable $50 , but simply didn't work for long. Smoke filled night clubs seemed to accelerate the deterioration !

You really can't use this drive as your main drive, but for archival purposes they're great as long as you remove the disk and place it in the protective plastic wrapper and store it away in a moisture free place. The drive could be bought for only $600.00 (retail may have been as high as $1395), plus $175.00 for the SCSI retro in 1988-89. The killer was trying to find the disks. In the late 80's they were around $175.00 for a 3 pack and hard to find.

More recently in 1997 they could be found at a place called ARCHY Solutions which just happened to have some packages of these disks in the back room (brand new) for $30.00 for a pack of three.

We don't know if they still exist today but their phone number was (415) 577-8065 and their address is.

ARCHY Solutions
1155 TritonDrive
Suite B
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