Custom-built multi-bank Roland M-256/M-512 memory cards

[ʝɵʝɵ]

Curious, are these cards also capable of being used to replace PCM cards? Or only the data cards? Forgive me if this is a stupid question or has been answered already.

Electrically, this is possible (there is an option to expose one 4M card rather than 16 256K or 8 512K cards). In practice however, there is no way simple way to put existing ROM data on the memory card (which you would first have to extract from another ROM card), and creating new ROM cards would require to reverse-engineer their binary format of that specific synthesizer.

Edit: More information about this can also be found on the last page of the card's manual, which is freely avaliable from the website.

[dojoe]

Curious, are these cards also capable of being used to replace PCM cards? Or only the data cards? Forgive me if this is a stupid question or has been answered already.

Not stupid at all It's been asked before but it's hidden deep inside the bowels of this thread

The cards can be used for PCM data and should be compatible with PCM cards up to 4MBit. For sizes outside the 256KBit and 512KBit formats we support they need to be reconfigured, but that's documented in the manual. There are also PCM cards larger than 4MBit out there - our card will not work in slots made for these as they use a different connector.

The main problem is that there is no generic reader/writer for this type of memory card so it'll be hard to get the PCM data on there. People have successfully built such reader/writers of course but I'm not aware of any commercially available ones. The test jig I'm using to test every card we sell can certainly do this, but it's quite the opposite of "ready for market"

The most ingenuous trick I've seen so far was one person turned an original card slot and a DIP pin header into an adapter for an EPROM programmer - that's probably as simple as it gets if you have the programmer handy

Hope that helps!