Hi.

I´m not too sure that the following flaws are bugs, but I didn´t see any forum that would be more appropriate. Some general info on my system first:
MK-II 12GB (blue), image 0.95 or something like that
Desktop system: Gigabyte GA7IX, Athlon 500, 256MB RAM, Win98SE or Win2K
Notebook: Maxdata (www.maxdata.de) Harvard SL Pro with Pentium III 600, 128MB, Win98SE
OK, now for my problems, from worst down to hardly a problem at all:

1. After power off/power on, the unit hangs during boot up most of the time(about 2 out of 3 tries), usually with only the empeg logo with tux onm the screen along with some minor harddisk activities. Sometimes I only get a random pattern of set/unset pixels with seemingliy no harddisk access/spinup.
   Any hint on this one? The problem seems to be worse the lower the supplied voltage is, that is it seems as if I get more successful boots with a 15V power supply than with a 12V supply, though both are in the allowed range.


2. Some songs seem to crash the system, but I was unable to track them down yet (post mortem debugging is difficult when using a non-info-visual at the time of the crash).


3. The display seems to have lines with brighter and lines with darker pixels. The difference in brightness is not big, but noticeable. Is this a known/frequent problem with empeg displays, or is it just my unit?


4. (At least) On my desktop system, under Win2k, I am unable to access the empeg via network as stable and successful as under Win98. emplode finds the empeg, connects to it, and at some (seemingly random) point during the trasfer it aborts with a non-informative error message (error 7 or something), the logfile says something about an internal timeout. Under Win98, I don´t have any problem using the network connection.


5. (At least) on my notebook, under Win98SE, I can not connect to my empeg via USB. Win98SE detects the empeg, searches for matching drivers (at least says so), and returns to normal operation. emplode however does not find the empeg, no matter which connection settings I use (USB only, USB+serial, USB+net or all). Any hints what this could be caused by?


6. Finally, my empeg came with a 9pin/25pin adapter, but without a serial cable (Serial# o# my empeg is 080...0113 AFAIR). I read about problems with some of the serial cables. Do I get a serial cable in the near future?


Any hints on how to solve the issues (well, those that are solvable) or a pointer to workarounds would be greatly appreciated.

cu,
sven

cu,
sven

my empeg came with a 9pin/25pin adapter, but without a serial cable. I read about problems with some of the serial cables. Do I get a serial cable in the near future?

Yes. Rob decided it would be better to ship some empegs without serial cables than to ship them with the wrong serial cable, while the distributor pulled their head out of sorted out their problem. You should receive a replacement soon.

After power off/power on, the unit hangs during boot up most of the time(about 2 out of 3 tries), usually with only the empeg logo with tux onm the screen along with some minor harddisk activities.

If this happens only in the car, check out this thread and see if that's the issue.

If you can get this to happen using the indoor power supply, use this technique to see what the unit is telling you at bootup. Of course, you can't do this without the cable, so you'll have to wait for the cable before you can do it.

Some songs seem to crash the system, but I was unable to track them down yet (post mortem debugging is difficult when using a non-info-visual at the time of the crash).

If you can narrow it down to a particular song, analyze the song with MP3Trim's analysis features and see if there's anything wrong with its frames. Then send the song to Empeg as an example so they can make the decoder more robust on those kinds of errors.

Win98SE detects the empeg, searches for matching drivers (at least says so), and returns to normal operation. emplode however does not find the empeg, no matter which connection settings I use (USB only, USB+serial, USB+net or all). Any hints what this could be caused by?

That behavior would happen if you tried connecting the Empeg before installing Emplode. Is that what you did? If so, try de-installing and re-installing Emplode. If that works, please come back to this thread and report it as a working solution.

The display seems to have lines with brighter and lines with darker pixels. The difference in brightness is not big, but noticeable. Is this a known/frequent problem with empeg displays, or is it just my unit?

If you mean this, then yeah, that's normal.

___________
Tony Fabris

After power off/power on, the unit hangs during boot up most of the time(about 2 out of 3 tries), usually with only the empeg logo with tux onm the screen along with some minor harddisk activities.

If this happens only in the car, check out this thread and see if that's the issue.

Well, interesting thread anyway, but the problem also occures with the factory (i.e. the onw supplied by empeg) power supply.

If you can get this to happen using the indoor power supply, use this technique to see what the unit is telling you at bootup. Of course, you can't do this without the cable, so you'll have to wait for the cable before you can do it.

Right. I will try to find a null modem cable somewhere in my huge pile of computer cables. Might be worth a try. However that has to wait until I leave hospital.

Win98SE detects the empeg, searches for matching drivers (at least says so), and returns to normal operation. emplode however does not find the empeg, no matter which connection settings I use (USB only, USB+serial, USB+net or all). Any hints what this could be caused by?

That behavior would happen if you tried connecting the Empeg before installing Emplode. Is that what you did? If so, try de-installing and re-installing Emplode. If that works, please come back to this thread and report it as a working solution.

No, that´s not what I did. I originally used the network transfer method, as my home network has quite enough IPs (officially routed, 6 usable IPs for 3 computers+empeg+printserver, of course behind a firewall) and dynamic address allocation (all but one computer do get their IPs via bootp/dhcp). So emplode was installed way (um, ok, 1 day) before I connected the empeg via USB.

The display seems to have lines with brighter and lines with darker pixels. The difference in brightness is not big, but noticeable. Is this a known/frequent problem with empeg displays, or is it just my unit?

If you mean this, then yeah, that's normal.

Well, yes, that´s what I ment. I mean it is not tooo bad, but it somehow disturbs my high quality impression of my MK-II. But I think I can live with that.

cu,
sven