Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

HxC Floppy Emulator Akai Keyboards/Samplers support
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raynulds
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 10:11 pm

Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

Post by raynulds »

Hi!

I bought a HxC from ebay this auction specifically and have installed it into my S3000XL. When I turn it on the screen says "FF 3.36 32Kb" and it has a rotary encoder, in case that makes a difference. I needed to mess around with the jumpers and change some settings in .cfg on the USB, but I found enough guidance on the website that I got this working. I'm able to tell that it's setup correctly because I bought a .hfe image from https://www.sampleoidz.co.uk/ and I can load that onto the USB, and the sampler reads it fine - can play the samples from the main outputs, load into memory, etc. All seemed good...

My problem is - I want to create .hfe images myself from a bunch of .wav samples on my computer. I downloaded the HxCFloppyEmulator software and followed the steps in this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2ixOkdRc6A but the resulting images did not load correctly on the sampler.

I tried to open the working disk image I bought with the software, and it seems to load fine in the main UI and the scrolling message tells me it's 80 tracks 2 sides (this differs from the 84 tracks that some tutorials pointed me to). I found this thread: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=710 which also indicated 80 sides is the correct value. However, if I set these custom settings:
hxc_settups_v2.png
hxc_settups_v2.png (144.37 KiB) Viewed 4506 times
and then click on 'Disk Browser', as shown in the youtube video, I get a red error message at the bottom of the disk browser - "Null sized DOS image ! Invalid disk !". This means I can't drag any wav samples in, and I'm stuck. Similarly, if I try to use the disk browser having loaded the working image I bought, I get the same message.

Notably, the working image I have is 3921KB in windows, and the settings from that forum thread give me an empty floppy of exactly the same size (other settings I tried gave me larger or smaller images). I feel I'm fairly close to getting this working, but it seems the HxCSoftwareEmulator is capable of creating disk formats that it isn't able to copy files into (?). I'm not sure what to try next.

Can anyone give me any pointers on how to go from some .wav samples on windows into a 3921KB .hfe file that the S3000XL will read? Do I need to first convert make an .img file and then convert to .hfe? Any help would be massively appreciated!

Jeff
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Re: Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

Post by Jeff »

Hello,

This Gotek has no point with the HxC Project. If you want further support/assistance from me please get the hxc firmware and install it on your drive first :

https://hxc2001.com/store/

Thanks !
:)

raynulds
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 10:11 pm

Re: Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

Post by raynulds »

Ah sorry - I now realise that FlashFloppy != HxC - sorry for my ignorance!

Have just bought a license, will install and post back here soon once I have that working.

raynulds
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2022 10:11 pm

Re: Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

Post by raynulds »

Still waiting for a USB-A - USB-A cable to arrive in the post to allow me to flash the bootloader, but I actually managed to figure this out and wanted to share the info for anyone else searching for this in the future as this has required multiple evenings of googling before I cracked it...

* Install akaiutils from https://sourceforge.net/projects/akaiutil/ (works fine on windows 10)
* Download the blank floppy images from https://sourceforge.net/projects/akaiut ... p/download - extract the S3000 one (should be 1600KB)
* Run "akaiutils template_filename.img" on the command line, use "wav2s3 sample_filename.wav" to put a sample into the image. Run "dir" to check it's there. Exit the program to save
* In HxCFloppyEmulator click 'Load Raw Image" and pick "Akai S3000 3.5 HDD floppy disk" from the "predefined disk layout" dropdown (can't believe I didn't spot this before!)
* Click "Load Raw File" and navigate to the .img file that you have written a sample to
* "Floppy Image" -> "Export Disk / Save as" -> give a filename, this makes a .hfe image which should be 3921KB
* Put hfe on your usb, put in gotek, should load in the sampler fine.

Now I need to write some code to mass convert thousands of samples...

Jeff
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Joined: Fri Oct 20, 2006 12:12 am
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Re: Help creating .hfe images for S3000XL

Post by Jeff »

For the HxC part there is a command line tool available.

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