Any Ensoniq MR experts?

[abruzzi]

I just got an MR Rack. There is very little info out there on this guy. I had a few question that may be failures, normal behavior, or user error, and I'd like some input. I do have the manual and I'm working though it. When I got it, it had a bad battery which I replaced. It is on a pretty old OS (1.03) but I don't have the right kind of EPROMs, so I'm waiting on some chips before I upgrade.

- 1.50 is the newest files ROM images I can find for the MR Rack, but it seems 1.53 is the newest OS. Has anyone seen downloads for the 1.53 ROM anywhere?

- the unit came with the Drum expansion ROM. On power up it spends ~60 seconds "registering expander" where it zips through what looks like all the sounds on the expander. It does this on every power up. At first I though it was the bad battery, but it still does this after I replaced the battery (and the battery replacement was successful as I don't get error messages anymore and other things like global settings are remembered.). Is this process normal on every boot up? I'm planning on adding other EXP boards and with three installed, it seems the boot up could take a while.

- many of the drum ROM sounds don't make a sound. Specifically, when I boot up in "sound" mode, select "EXP-SND" as the sound type, then I scroll through the sound and everything in banks EXP019 through EXP021 make no sound. However in the bank of kits EXP023 all 128 sounds work. Is this user error? Or is it a bad board?

So far, everything else seems to work, but I haven't gotten very deep, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Rasputin]

- 1.50 is the newest files ROM images I can find for the MR Rack, but it seems 1.53 is the newest OS. Has anyone seen downloads for the 1.53 ROM anywhere?

Unless someone lovely here has v1.53 and can read it out, I doubt you're going to find the binaries for it. So far as I know, the only place to get the EPROMs (aside from a machine that already has v1.53) is through Thesoniq.

For the sake of archival, do you mind reading out and posting your older EPROMs once you acquire v1.53 or burn v1.50? Sometimes having old versions of firmware can help for comparison purposes when making custom firmware and such things, so the more the merrier.

[abruzzi]

just a follow up--I received some blank EPROMS of the correct type and burned them with OS 1.50. That fixed all my problems from the first post. It seems that 1.03 doesn't work correctly with EXP cards (or at least the drum EXP card.)

[Rasputin]

Firmware v1.53 for the Ensoniq MR Rack is now up on the SkinnyV archive @:

http://dbwbp.com/index.php/9-misc/37-synth-eprom-dumps

The filename is "Ensoniq_MR_RACK_1.53.zip" should anyone be still in search of it.