EX5 ROM upgrade

Peter Korsten peter at severity-one.com
Tue Feb 10 21:24:10 CET 2015


Some of you may know that I own an EX5 ;-) and that I try to load it 
with all possible extras. So it's got four additional outputs, SCSI, 64 
MB RAM, and 16 MB Flash memory. The one thing really missing was getting 
the latest OS.

You may remember Tim's (random variate) offer on this list to get you 
the latest OS. So I took him up on that, and for a very reasonable fee 
(basically cost price) he delivered the four chips. Replacing them is 
fairly easy, although I would recommend buying a chip puller. You could 
perhaps get away with using a small screwdriver, but there isn't really 
enough space if you only remove the large metal plate in the bottom. 
(The one you remove if you want to install SCSI or replace the battery.)

Even though I managed to bend two pins between chip and socket - Tim 
quickly helped identify this problem, which I managed to overlook when 
doing the visual check - the chips were inserted properly in the end.

Boot up, and everything worked! Large samples now load in a manner of 
seconds. ;-) OK, the latter is not true, and cannot be solved because of 
the design of the EX5, but at least this takes care of the bugs (and 
there have been quite a few) in the earlier versions of the EX5 OS.

Given the price of the upgrade, and given the value your EX5/EX5R/EX7 
has for you, I think it's well worth it.

No, I'm not getting paid for this endorsement. :-)

Thanks again to Tim,

- Peter


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