Elliott Writes…

Maybe you just picked up an Ensoniq EPS-16+ (like I just did), and have become ill looking for the manual, opearting system disks, and sound files.

Maybe you’d like to create an OS disk without using windows.

And maybe, you’re looking for a good source for DSDD (720k) floppy disks.

For starters, the EPS-16 is a sampler. It does not contain an oscillator, and therefore is likely completely silent when purchased. You must record audio with the provided 50kOhm 1/4″ unbalanced input, and manipulate it within the sampler. You may also find sounds on disk (ebay is filled with this), as well as on the internet. If you put sounds on your operating system disk, and load the disk into flash memory, I believe the sounds will be loaded onto the flash memory as well. I could be wrong. Using external SCSI equipment, the EPS-16 can access drives as large (maybe larger) as 9.2 GB, Zip drives (100MB ones), and Jazz drives (2GB).

I’ve found two manuals thus far:
A “musician’s” manual, for the EPS-16
A complete manual, in German, for the EPS-16+
And a great quick-reference card
I’m told the manual for the ASR-10 is similar enough to substitute.

If you have unix, you know what to do. Here’s the OS for the EPS-16+. Use dd. As far as I know, there is only one USB floppy drive that will work with 800k (720k formatted) DSDD disks. So find an old pc with an internal drive, and either use dd or rawrite (win) to record this image to a disk. I consider this easier than running an old dos program (see below) to format and write to a floppy drive.

If your EPS-16+ has a 25-pin dsub connector, as far as I know, that’s the SCSI port. Pitty they aren’t labled. Your EPS should state “SCSI INSTALLED” briefly while booting.

And that 9-pin mini din connector, it sends out a mux’d signal on two wires, which has to be decoded into six discrete outputs. So don’t bother trying to ‘find’ the analog audio there.
There’s a shareware program out there for putting files onto disks (from a computer), called EDE, from Giebler Enterprises. It runs just fine under FreeDOS. I haven’t tried it under dosemu, but I believe it would run.

Lastly, I bought some floppy disks from Tiger Direct, item number I103-8505. You can usually search for “DSDD” and come up with it. As far as I know, IBM, Imation, and Verbatium continue to manufacture double-sided double-density floppy disks. While Office Max shows they carry these, if you attempt to order any, they will call you back and tell you ‘an error occured’, and you’ll have to get them from somewhere else.