Ensoniq SQ80
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was an eight-voice, polyphonic, poly-timbral synthesizer in the late 80's. The SQ80 offered a so named CrossWave synthesis sound creation with 75 Waveforms combined with a rich variety of modulation sources. There was a sequencer with eight tracks and capacity of max. 20000 notes and a MIDI controller for manage external devices. The internal 3,5" floppy disk drive is for saving single Sounds, Soundbanks, SysEx data or for saving the content of the sequencer. If you are reading this page, you maybe own still such an instrument. Maybe you owned one and have found some floppy disks and like to take a look for it's content. This is exactly the fact, why i started once again to deal with the stuff the last weeks. (Another side effect of the lockdown :-) In 2012 i tried to import some songs via MIDI-cable into the PC-software, but got only damaged and interrupted seqence parts. So i thougth, i can use the content of the floppy discs. I came to the internet page of Rainer Buchty (link), where i found many useful informations. With one of my old PCs i started to make dumps from all my floppies. Then i tried to write a script for extract the content and to convert the sequences into MIDI. But without success. Now, nine years later i started the examination again, finally nearly all binary puzzles are 'deciphered' and my problem is solved. Now i can extract all sequences from my early works and import them as MIDI into some software at PC.
This files (size = 880 kB) are now usable with the SQ80DumpReader script. The script splits the dump into max. ten long files (sqx - sequence stuff), program banks and one single-program-file. Or only take a look of the content with (r) option. A file *.txt is created anyway in the same directory of the dump. With the python script SQ80BankReader the parameter of the Sounds of a bank can be extracted. This script also works with single program files (*.prg). Again you can only view the data (r) or write them into a textfile. And now with SQ80makeMIDI an extracted long data file (*.sqx) can be splitted into one or all sequences and the songdata can be extracted to see the steps in a SQ80-Song. Take attention, that the track number become in destination the MIDI-channel. So the MIDI channel in SQ80 is not used! All scripts are python scripts, written in python 3.4, so a python 3 installation is necessary. MD5-Hash data for the scripts:hash Ensoniq and SQ80 are Trademarks of Ensoniq Corp. |
