Minor issue on Sysex importer
Posted: Sun May 19, 2024 8:05 pm
Hi, I just installed the Cherry Chroma. I'm a long-time Chroma fan and still have a couple of them in various states of being refurbished. Great to see the nice work you've done on your VST version.
I've been developing for the Chroma since it came out. First with a Z-80 system interfaced to the native parallel port. I added the Syntech MIDI interface, and wrote a Chroma Editor in DOS for the MPU-401 MIDI interface. It created .CHR files that did include names. I later migrated my several thousand patches to a DBASE database (I wrote an ASM subroutine to write the patch under the cursor to the edit buffer on the Chroma). Later I migrated to my SysexFiler utility that I used with all MIDI instruments. It can read and write sysex over MIDI and to and from files.
With that long introduction to the issue.... The Chroma instrument (currently running standalone) accepts and loads the Sysex files from Sysexfiler perfectly. For example "Chroma50set.syx". However when I tried to load some older sysex files from the DOS days (TIMS3-87.SYX), The Chroma instrument refuses them - the cursor changes to the circle/slash. I carefully inspected the files in hex, sysex headers, postfix, file length, etc. No differences other than the embedded patch data.
I finally had an inspiration, and changed the suffix from .SYX to .syx. Then Chroma loaded it. There may not be many like me with files dating back to DOS, but in any case it would be good to make the file type checking case-independent.
After importing, I see the 59 byte presets are expanded into user presets like "Chroma50set Preset 1.chromapreset", which are about 5K in size. The format is binary and not apparent from quick inspection. My original database has over 2400 patches in it. It contains other metadata like name, category, source file loaded from, and date added. If you could send me the documentation on the .chromapreset file format, I can see if it practical to convert the database to that format and share it with other users.
I've been developing for the Chroma since it came out. First with a Z-80 system interfaced to the native parallel port. I added the Syntech MIDI interface, and wrote a Chroma Editor in DOS for the MPU-401 MIDI interface. It created .CHR files that did include names. I later migrated my several thousand patches to a DBASE database (I wrote an ASM subroutine to write the patch under the cursor to the edit buffer on the Chroma). Later I migrated to my SysexFiler utility that I used with all MIDI instruments. It can read and write sysex over MIDI and to and from files.
With that long introduction to the issue.... The Chroma instrument (currently running standalone) accepts and loads the Sysex files from Sysexfiler perfectly. For example "Chroma50set.syx". However when I tried to load some older sysex files from the DOS days (TIMS3-87.SYX), The Chroma instrument refuses them - the cursor changes to the circle/slash. I carefully inspected the files in hex, sysex headers, postfix, file length, etc. No differences other than the embedded patch data.
I finally had an inspiration, and changed the suffix from .SYX to .syx. Then Chroma loaded it. There may not be many like me with files dating back to DOS, but in any case it would be good to make the file type checking case-independent.
After importing, I see the 59 byte presets are expanded into user presets like "Chroma50set Preset 1.chromapreset", which are about 5K in size. The format is binary and not apparent from quick inspection. My original database has over 2400 patches in it. It contains other metadata like name, category, source file loaded from, and date added. If you could send me the documentation on the .chromapreset file format, I can see if it practical to convert the database to that format and share it with other users.