Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 14 February 2020 13:31
A wild Darwin enters the fray! Yes, jumping on the dawless bandwagon I have nabbed a E-MU Darwin for the cost of shipping, to mess around with.
So, what IS Darwin? There is very little on the web about these.
Darwin is an 8 track hard disk recorder from about 1997.
Stock, it has 4 balanced analog inputs, 8 balanced analog outputs, SPDIF in/out and MIDI.
Mine has the extra options giving me 8 balanced analog outputs and ADAT optical.
Internally, there is not a lot going on. I have a spare SCSI2SD to stick inside it, but my problem right now is getting a hold of the latest ROM to upgrade it.
Right now I have ROM v2.02, and I'm trying to get my hands on v2.5. Without that I am limited to 2gb drive sizes, but with it I can upgrade to 4gb partitions.
One very rare hard to find expansion I'd love to get is the DSP card. Reading between the lines, the DSP card is bascally and EMU8000 chip on a small board, and you also add 2x30 pin SIMM ram modules to the main board.
Everything I read about in the manual all lines up with what the EMU8000 does and how its used in other E-MU devices.
I have dumped the v2.02 ROM here, as LSB/MSB image and a combined image. You will need two 27C040 EPROMS to burn these (or two ST 27C4001 which my originals are).
tags: Audio, Darwin, E-MU, Recorder
| rvense said on September 09, 2020 14:18:57; | |
| How about some shots of the internals? I'm a huge E-mu Ultra nerd, and I wondering if they have anything in common. Which processor is in it? | |
| Stu said on September 14, 2020 14:31:04; | |
| I can try and get some pics. The internal layout on the Darwin is totally different from the Ultra's. Ive not seen inside a classic 64 or that so I cant tell how close it is. I think its the first unit that had the graphic lcd display, its display board is totally different from an Ultra. Ill get some pictures for another blog post. | |
| obsoletemachines said on March 19, 2022 18:19:48; | |
| the DSP card gives you the famed pitch change function which was meant to be very good and not found elsewhere on the Emu lineup. | |
(dont include links in your comments.)