Official Drive Upgrade?

Having just purchased my Empeg, and, hopefully, it still being under warranty as it hasn't been opened, does Sonic Blue still offer official drive upgrades? If so, what's the going rate?

Otherwise, I'll have to risk using Tony's guide which, while comprehensive, concerns me if only because I don't want to worry about breaking my new toy!

Be patient Evan, you have 20gig currently which will provide you with a good selections of music, over 200 CDs.
Then, you'll probably find out that some one more comfortable with doing drive upgrades lives nearby.

Here's the catch: I have a 400 cd collection. 20 GB is a magnificent start, granted.

It's really pretty easy, provided you're comfortable with that sort of thing. IMO, if you've built a computer from parts then you're definitely ready to take this on. Just make sure you follow all directions - especially the bit about properly removing the hot glue from the drive cable. Those cables are fragile!

You might just want to wait until the warranty is up, so as not to waste it - My Empeg developed a display board problem within the first three months of use, which I am very glad was covered.

does Sonic Blue still offer official drive upgrades?

Good question. I think maybe not?

If someone can give me a definitive answer, I will correct the text in the drive upgrade guide.

Aw heck, I'm just going to remove the text anyway. As I understand it, hardly anyone took them up on the upgrade offer even when the players were current.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I've built plenty of PCs but, as Tony warned in his instructions, this is a little bit tougher.

Yes, but any "tough" parts are clearly illustrated in the guide.

I still stand by the statements that it's not as easy as upgrading a PC's hard disk, and that risking damage to your player and voiding its warranty should be a primary concern.

But I've taken great care to make the drive upgrade guide comprehensive enough to make your average techy-person feel comfortable with the procedure.

My standard reply is:

"I can still provide drive upgrades, however the pricing is not very
favourable as with the recent price reductions, the cost is more than we
were selling the players for.

"At present I can only provide 20GB drive upgrades at 200UKP, excluding
shipping and any applicable taxes."

I then point the user to the drive upgrade article at riocar.org

Thanks, David!

Alrighty. Then, inevitably, I will make good use of the upgrade guide. I'm not especially afraid of PC hardware but, as you wrote in the guide, the spaces are somewhat more confined and the connections slightly more error prone -- although the latter reminds me of the days when I built my own Pentium and P2 systems...

although the latter reminds me of the days when I built my own Pentium and P2 systems...

Okay, am I just ancient, or does someone else here remember building their own 8088 systems?

hey evan, im talking with some of the guys from sonicblue to do an easy plug and play drive upgrade solutions, so i would mail u the drive and u would just put it in the player, i set up the software, and the jumpers, rob ok'ed it david did. so ill keep u updated, look in the for sale section to and look for my post.

Okay, am I just ancient, or does someone else here remember building their own 8088 systems?

Naaaah. Though I only started builing my own systems with the 80286/AT, I used to have an XT (bought pre-built) with which I tinkered a lot.

Must be euuurm..... about 14 years now I guess.

Sheesh! I AM getting old!

I did build an 8088 based PC from scrounged components but that was some time after the 8088 had peaked so it's possibly cheating to mention that, at that time I had an Epson PC-AX (10MHz 80286, 640KB, 40MB), man the PC-AX was enviable.

My fond memories though lie with my Commodore PC-10 (4.77MHz 8088, 256KB, dual 360KB FDD). To upgrade this to 512KB (I'm not talking about cache RAM here ) it required 9x256k-bit DRAM ICs soldered in along with a replacement PAL IC. A subsequent upgrade to 640KB was greeted by comments from my boss like "What are you going to do with all that memory?". Answer, a RAMDrive of course!!

The PC-10, which was bought from work for £150 as a returned unit, shipped with a 12" Green (monochrome / MDA) monitor. The next upgrade was the installation of a CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) card (320x200) and re-engineering the mono monitor to work in grayscale (greenscale?) mode. The MDA display couldn't display bitmap graphics but the CGA could - this was an enviable upgrade and I ended up doing a lot of monitor bodges for others since colour CRTs were about 3x more expensive than mono ones. I could stop playing Planetfall and could now play MS flight Simulator (from a self-boot floppy), wow, PCs were cool!

We had an ST-506 interface 10MB 5.25" hard drive at work, it was an evaluation model that the supplier had forgotten about. After a lot of pleading, my boss let me take the drive plus an 8-bit ISA controller home on long term loan. To put things in perspective, the OS (MS DOS 2.11) lived on a 5.25" 360KB FDD with space to spare. The OS and my programs could now live on one (hard) drive and the bootup speed was so fast it had to be seen to be believed. Don't ask me the transfer bitrate of the ST-506 interface drives now, I'm sure it's well documented though, I do know that nowadays you could write a 1.44MB floppy faster byte for byte.

I sold the Commodore PC-10 a few years later for £100 (66%) more than I paid for it, the Epson PC-AX is currently in my attic with a £500 (i386/20) motherboard bodged into the chassis.

Nostalgia? It ain't what it used to be.

Hey, what a coincidence! The XT I was talking about was the Commodore PC20-III. Same as the PC10, but with a 20Mb harddisk! (not too shabby eh! )
This little box provided me with hours of pleasure, but it annoyed me sometimes too. One of my biggest culprits with it was that it could not read HD floppydisks when most of my friends started using those. (still using 720kb ? Man, this HD floppydisk with it's 1.44Mb gives me OCEANS of space! )
It's still on a box in the attic gathering dust...

20Mb hard drive?! You gotta be kidding. I've got a few mp3's that are 20 Mb.

I remember my friend getting an external 1 meg HD for his C-64. A very nice way to run a BBS....

I had an amiga with a gigantic 120Mb disk which never goteven near half full.

But the entire operating system fitted on three disks and dtill kicks windows arse for relaibilty

20Mb hard drive?! You gotta be kidding. I've got a few mp3's that are 20 Mb.

Nope, dead serious. Of course, those were the days that PC's still only went BEEP!

Commodore PC20-III

I could only dream about owning one of those!

I never did own a C64, went straight from the Vic-20 to the C128. And I had a whopping 10Meg Hdd. Wheeeee. AND 2 of the 1571 floppy's. (waaaaay faster than the 1541's). ;8^)
I still have it all in my garage. Only problem is that lightning struck NEAR the building and the EMI wiped all my disks. The only thing that still works is my fastload, Jumpman Jr, and Choplifter cartridges.

Ne1 here ever mess with Frodo?

I had a C-64 myself but I don't remember much about it except getting the magazine that had programs in it. I remember sitting at the keyboard for hours typing 1's and 0's line after line.

Had Donkey Kong and some other adventure games for it. Was fun.

I had a Zorba.... what a freak of machinery that was... then a c-64... the first PC I ever built myself was a 486 DX2.

Sheesh, My first computer was a Amstrad/Schneider CPC664, with a lightning fast 3" (sic!) disk drive that stored up to 720kB. That was back when a IBM PC (no clones at that time) was at about 10000$ range (with no HD!).
I had a 512KB RAM extension (battery buffered) for my CPC and a nice monochrome (green) monitor. I never bought a HD though, didn't see a need for that. All in all, my CPC cost me about 6000$ with its peripherals.
My first PC was a 286 with 1MB RAM and 20MB HD and EGA graphics. That one did cost about 2500$ including the monitor.
Next came a home built 386 (AMD) with 16MB RAM and a 320MB HD (at that time, that was huge). It was later upgraded to a 486/133MHz with 64MB and an additional 640MB disc.
That computer ran my BBS (using FrontDoor/RemoteAccessBBS) for years, namely from 1992 (IIRC) to 1997(again,IIRC), when I upgraded to a Pentium 200MMX and Linux.

cu,
sven

EDIT: Corrected the unit for the CPC RAM expansion from MB to KB

Oh, yeah! I remember the day with my C-64. Made my way through 300, 1200, and 2400 baud modems! Even had a BBS running off of said 1MB HDD.

Talking about modems... I also remember that summer 1984 when my Apple II (which is still on my shelf less that 1 meter away... ;-) ) got connected to the world through a 200 baud modem (my brother had built it... Those devices were not yet for sale in Italy that time...)
Nice remembrances... Those were the days when one could feel sort of pioneer... The empeg is making me feel similar emotions nowadays, though... ;-)


Alberto

I remember sitting at the keyboard for hours typing 1's and 0's line after line.

All together now...

"And sometimes we ran out of ones."

I could never afford a floppy drive for my C64 - I was stuck with the slower-than-a-snail and less-reliable-than-British-Rail tape unit. That tape-unit sucked big time - the error-checking in the loader code was basically to load the program once and verify it byte for byte 8 times, and fail miserably if any of the 8 verifying loads didn't match...or something like that. So each program ended up taking 9 times as long to load as was really necessary. Eventually most of the games publishers caught on to this and provided their own loaders, thank God.

Anyone here remember Wizball?

I remember the tape drives for the C64. As I recall, it took about half an hour to load game into the thing. During the days of the NES and probably before, the term "tape" persisted when refering to game cartridges.

Stu

LOL. I always hated when I got done and the damn program didn't work and I would have to start all over again. It was hard typing them correctly. And I have no clue anymore what the programs even did back then.

Justin,

I'm pretty sure I didn't OK anything (or refuse anything)..? I spoke with David and this is the first he's heard of it.

I haven't got authority to give anyone permission to distribute SB software. I could say I'm far too busy to notice what you are or are not doing in that respect, but if someone gets upset it's your problem. You should also make it clear that warranty will be voided by any drive upgrade not fitted by SB.

Rob

I had a tape drive with my Vic-20, but when I bought the C-128 it came with dual floppies. My dad bought it used from a guy in the Navy that was shipping out. He sold the monitor (TV), C-128, 2 1571's, 300Bps modem, a light pen, koala pad, 3 joysticks, 300+ disks FULL of crap, the desk, the chair, and ~300 Commodore programming mags for $1100. What a steal. I was 8 at the time. The thing I remember most distinctly was that there were 2 hustler mags mixed in with the techie ones. At 8 it was unthinkable luck.

The Vic-20 was bought b4 I had any idea what money was so I have no idea. Same with the Timex Sinclair and the TI. The TI, btw, used a REGULAR tape drive with RCA outs as the tape unit. Wow. I'll never forget going to my best friends house when he got his new computer, and his dad forbiding me to touch it when he wasn't in the room. Now guess who calls every time his computer hiccoughs.

Oh yeah, in my closet I have a 16k memory module from one of the first mainframes at Gulf Power. (I used to work there.) It's 9"x9" and has REAL transistors on it. It looks really cool. I shudder to think what it cost them at the time.

And not to put a damper on anything Justin intends to do, but it seems to me that the formatting/software-installing stage of the drive installation is the easiest part and requires essentially no skills. The difficult parts (disassembly, reassembly, etc.) still would have to be done even if you got the drive pre-formatted from Justin.