There was a demo cartridge or two available that actually had sequences in them that would play on a vanilla (non -SD) vfx. Looking back on my exploration a long time ago, the first portion of the rom (0 – 0x7c37) matches the raw portion of the sys-ex dump of 60 programs (the nibblized portion), and 7c38 through 7ff0 match the sys-ex dump of 20 presets (the mibblized portion), and there are 8 bytes left at the end: on a VPC 100, FFFF FFFF FFFF 0501 are the lst 8 bytes. Have you made any attempt to compare the rom contents with a sysex dump of the same programs, to determine the ROM format? 60 program sys-ex dumps are almost 64k, and since Ensoniq syx-ex format encodes a single internal byte into two MIDI bytes, that’s ~32k of ROM storage. (I believe this is totally my fault, I sent out the URL with the tilde originally). Hey, can you correct the URL to my page? The tilde now seems to be causing problems with my ISP. I don’t mean to discourage you, but the number of projects that I’ve started and wasted time on, rather than spending time actually making music… Well, I’ll just say make sure you know what you’re getting into and whether that will be the happiest way to use your time. (Likely cheaper even if your reverse engineering time was only worth minimum wage.) Nobody has done this that I know of, probably because it’s cheaper to buy something else capable of loading samples. To replace the samples in the VFX would require decoding and reverse engineering the ROM on the motherboard. With the exception of possibly being able to play a sequence on the vanilla VFX (which had no sequencer, but had store demonstration cartridges that played some kind of sequence), I don’t think you can get at anything in the VFX (or VFX-SD or SD-1) through the cartridge port that you can’t reach through MIDI sys-ex messages. Programs and presets, yes but you can already do those with the INT bank the cartridge just gives you more programs available instantly. You can’t put new samples in a cart even if you could, the 32K limit on size would mean only 1 second or so of sample data anyway. I don’t believe you can get much further toward your described dream by reverse engineering the cartridge.
Cartridge programs still use the internal waves. I feel I should let you know that the cartridge contains only synth programming data, not new audio samples.
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