Nice. I got a focus rite 3rd gen and used to own a volca FM which I was able to load patches on via dexed. Assuming this will work as well
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Ok so I managed to overwrite the internal patches, which i dont want to do.
But for some reason it wont let me overwrite the cartridge; which seems to have a lot more room (multiple banks)
any idea how to do so?
didnt manage to back up the OG patches neither unfortunately.
It’s been a while since I’ve used a cartridge. I think I did single patches to the II-FD’s temporary RAM and then saved the patch to cartridge instead of internal. Alternatively, send the whole 32 patch sysex to overwrite internal, and then dump them to cartridge. There is probably a write protect setting for the cartridge in the II-FD menu. As long as you have a sysex of your preferred internal patches, you can always load that in last if you’re done loading patches and if it’s not on the cartridge. If the patches you overwrote were default Yamaha, they should be easy to find on the web for download.
Thanks man you’re a lifesaver!
If you can push an entire “rom” of 32 patches to the cartridge at once that would be great.
Any idea how? Manual is not saying anything.
somehow the cartridge shows 16 banks of which 14 are UNFRMTD. so i need to get something on there.
What type of cartridge do you have? If it’s the standard ROM cartridge then it is Read Only Memory and you’d need a RAM cartridge if you want to write patches to it. There are some nice 3rd party RAM cartridges with multiple cartridge ‘banks’ available if yours is a ROM cartridge. If you do have a writable RAM cartridge, here is the formatting process. In the ‘Disk Memory Functions (FD Only)’ section of the manual (2 pages later) it shows saving entire memory to and from floppy disk with Internal or Cartridge as destination. I may have gone internal to floppy and then floppy to cartridge, but like I said it has been a while. To complicate matters further, my II-FDs have the Grey Matter E! expansions so the menu is different than the standard II-FD menu.
Yeah its the original ROM cartridge AFAIK…
Thanks for the input, really appreciate it. Ill look into RAM cartridges.
It just feels a bit weird that theres a rom with 16 banks of which theres only 2 actually occupied.
@lp1977 last Q: what’s the point of a ROM card then? Is it just for backing up internal.patches?
Love my DX7ii. If you have an iPad, checkout Patch Base:
Thanks! No ipad unfortunately.
Can you shed a light on the use of the ROM cartrdidge? Its mostly empty and theres no way to overwrite anything. Whats the use other than backup?
Its great dont get me wrong; I can overwrite the 64 internal patches and back them up by resetting, but still the ROM being so empty feels weird.
The ROM was just for reloading/restoring the original data. You could have custom patches in the internal memory and access the factory patches off of the ROM cart. I’m not sure which ROM you have but it’s either the original data or one of the ROMs they sold with different patches. I’m not sure about the internal architecture of the ROM cart or the way that the DX7-II sees the available banks. The DX7-II menu may show the option of reading and writing 16 banks, but I’m not sure that it’s actually reading that your ROM cart has 16 banks, or if it always presents the choice of accessing 16 banks even if the ROM cart only has 4 banks. It’s just that trying to access banks 5-16 would fail. Here is a page from the manual showing that the ROM cart has 4 banks, two of which are Voice/Performance, one is Fractional Scaling, and one is Microtuning. My II-FD’s are in storage so I can’t check them right now. I’m just going off of memory. Maybe I can dig one out this weekend.
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RAM cards are pretty expensive, but I’m seeing the E! Grey Matter board for 80$. Anyone got experience with that?
If you have a working drive that’s a good way to go. You can store a ton of patches on a disk. I forget how many off hand, 30 or 40 banks (of 16) or something like that. So many that for organizational purposes I would usually opt to use several discs rather than filling one up. Occasionally annoying that you have to save entire banks rather than individual patches but it would be unreasonable to expect much in the way of onboard floppy file management on this synth.
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Nice one, floppy’s are cheap
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Another question! Dexed allows me to load any OG sample which is amazing. I only figured out how to load into the first 32 internal slots, can’t u touch the 33-64 slots?
Maybe you can post a pic of that cartridge, there were a lot of after market cartridges out there and some of them had to be controlled in a weird way to access the different ROM slots because th DX can only handle 2 banks at a time, so it does not see all the other banks. The original ones had a switch on them iirc to select different banks in the ROM. It is still the 1980s 
I have a MK1 with the E! Grey Matter board installed. I am getting a Roland UM-ONE-MK2 interface to try to send the patches, my current cheapy interface does not seem to want to do this. Midi in and out for playing and recording works fine but the sysex patches don’t go.
I have done extensive research on this and I have all of the setting correct. Will come back and update this when I have figured it out.
So here replying to my own post… I got the Roland interface. It worked. Perfectly.
I used MIDI-OX and set low level output butter to Size: 1024 Num: 32.
Whatever bank is currently active gets written to. So that’s how it works with the E! Grey Matter board. Had to unprotect internal memory with the E! Grey Matter options. If you are stuck, let me know I can help get this working. It loads the full bank each time. All 32 patches in the .syx file.
Amazing.
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