HxC GOTEK Emulator working on Yamaha Clavinova CVP-96 (1998)

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Bigbit
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 15, 2022 4:50 pm

HxC GOTEK Emulator working on Yamaha Clavinova CVP-96 (1998)

Post by Bigbit »

My nearly quarter-century old digital piano (A Yamaha Clavinova CVP-96) still looks and sounds great; the one telltale weak spot was the need to use floppy disks to either record what we played or play MIDI songs on the piano. I've got a pretty fair collection of Yamaha and 3rd party MIDI diskettes (about 35), and I was getting tired of dealing with the old media. I also lost a disk or 2 to wear and tear, so I started looking into alternatives and found GOTEK.

I bought the GOTEK drive from Amazon on Wednesday. Yesterday (Saturday), I tore the piano open (actually quite easy) and installed the GOTEK. I found the native software pretty confusing and hopeless. My second try was using FlashFloppy. I seemed to get the drive working with FF, but I was still struggling to build a proper flash drive with disk images that the GOTEK would be able to read. After a number of hours of frustration, I gave up.

So, I then moved on to the HxC2001 software. I found the software tools easier to use and deal with, and I liked HxC's support for MAC software tools. I hit one minor wall, when I tried to flash the GOTEK with the HxC software - I missed the part in the HxC documents about having to do the e-mail swapping of files to verify that I had made the firmware purchase. Once I overcame that obstacle, the rest was relatively easy.

I made a 6 disk thumb drive last night to test the unit and all went well. I'm now waiting for my wife to awake so that I can test my latest GOTEK thumb drive that contains about 40 floppies' worth of MIDI files - my entire Yamaha library.

Thanks to the HxC team for making such a great, useful product!

Bigbit
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 15, 2022 4:50 pm

Re: HxC GOTEK Emulator working on Yamaha Clavinova CVP-96 (1998)

Post by Bigbit »

So, now that the emulator is confirmed to be working, I took it out of the piano to upgrade the display to a 0.91” 128 X 32 pixel OLED.

What a difference! I can now see the disk names easily on the OLED display.

Very happy with this emulator. It makes the piano much more user-friendly!

While I had the piano apart, I pulled the entire keyboard assembly apart and cleaned every one of the 88 keys and all the internals. No more sticky keys!

Tomorrow I will put everything back together, and maybe I can post a short demo on how the emulator is working.

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