E-MU EMAX 1 SE - IC 1772 floppy drive controller

#1

Greetings from Athens, Greece,

I just bought an EMAX 1 SE (keyboard) with a dead drive, but it seems that an HxC emulator will not solve it that simple…

I installed an HxC, plus I tried swapping the floppy drive from my SP1200 but I keep on getting the same diagnostics cycle when trying to load software: all diagnostics lights are flashing on each read cycle. Bear in mind that if I don’t try to load the OS, no light is up (diagnostics come clean).

My next search was inside the keyboard to check on the IC 1772 (disk drive controller) and this specific chip seems in a dodgy state, like someone already tried to remover & resit it. Additionally, my search showed that quite a lot of different actions (like the use of a wrong floppy ribbon) could also cause damage to this chip.

So, my obvious question is: where can I source one such chip to replace mine? I’ve seen that the EMAX shares a lot of components with the Ensoniq MIRAGE. Could a swap from a Mirage do the work?

Has anyone seen this problem before?

Thanks in advance for any help!

#2

Some Mirages did indeed use a 1772 - but some used a 1770 controller (I don’t know if these can be swapped). But if you find a 1772, you should be able to drop it in yours and hopefully that will solve the trouble.

Before soldering another one on your Emax board, you may want to install an IC socket first.

Rather than sacrifice a Mirage for that chip, maybe you can find an old Alesis Datadisk - it uses a 1772 also. A bunch of other keyboards used it too - but nothing as inexpensive as the Datadisk.

#3

Hey Sam,

thanks for the Datadisk tip, I really appreciate it as I would also hate to have to sacrifice a Mirage just for a 1772.

I was also thinking about a new socket too, this one looks already damaged enough.

Again, thanks for the help!