My Roland SP808 Quest- help needed.

[Silverfish]

Hi folks.

This one is really, really OT. I've had a roland sp808 for a while now (it was my first piece of real gear), and I don't think I could ever part with it. The problem is that Roland thought 100mb zip drives were a technology that would not soon be overtaken. I've searched for a number of replacements, among them a compact flash drive (unsuccesful), a larger zip drive (known to work, but only partially solves the problem), and using a hard drive.  The sp808 is very similar to the VS series mixers roland released, and a number of folks have successfuly used all of the above to bypass their limited zip drives. Roland made a model similar to the 808 for video production, the A6. Rather than having a zip drive, it had a small hard drive (6Gb?). This would seem to indicate that a hard drive will work. I haven't tried it yet, but a few other ideas popped into my head:

1. Is it at all possible to emulate zip drive firmware on a hard drive? The goal being to trick the 808 into thinking there's still just a zip drive.

um... I guess that was my only question for you wonderful programming-type people.  I appreciate any info you may have on obliterating this confounded zip drive (although, truthfully, I should be thankful the zip drive still works).

Thanks,

Silverfish

[fluke]

Which connector does the larger Zip drive which works use?  External Zip (100MB) drives came in 3 formats: Parallel Port, SCSI and Parallel+SCSI.  Internal ones came in IDE and possibly SCSI as well.

If it is an IDE drive, a hard drive should just drop in.  Or a Compact Flash card with a CF to IDE adapter.  The only thing to be concerned about is the maximum size drive supported.  The first of the IDE limits was ~540MB.

[Silverfish]

The internal zip uses an IDE/ATAPI connector. I tried the CF to IDE converter with a 512MB card but had no success. Good thing they're really cheap. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to test a small hard drive.

Thanks,

Silverfish

[stryd_one]

Definitely... I'd recommend trying a few different ages though, because a small UDMA5 drive might not work, where a small PIO drive may, etc... Will depend on the vintage of the controller.