Nord User Forum

[Ivan Jochner]

Also Icarus said that... but science and technology is not about dreams, it is based on facts...

Without any experiments and disires with dreams we still would play Mono Synths without polyphony and so on.

1.Any technological thing starts in people minds first then experiments prooves it right or wrong.

2.The matter of fact that my Motif Xs accepts 2 gig memory instead of 1 as stated in manual. Thats why i place an "crazy idea" before i found another
thread which i gave a link to.

[maxpiano]

In this case there is nothing to “experiment”, the architecture of the Nord Stage is quite well known and it is not expandable, the Motif has a totally different architecture. Anyway, if you think you want to try...

[Leo Castro]

Also Icarus said that... but science and technology is not about dreams, it is based on facts...

Without any experiments and disires with dreams we still would play Mono Synths without polyphony and so on.

1.Any technological thing starts in people minds first then experiments prooves it right or wrong.

2.The matter of fact that my Motif Xs accepts 2 gig memory instead of 1 as stated in manual. Thats why i place an "crazy idea" before i found another
thread which i gave a link to.

1. People who experiments and improve are the people who made those instruments, almost always
2. My Juno G as per the owners manual accepts only up to 1gb of compact flash cards, or up to 512 mb of ram dimm pc133, but i never knew about some guy who toked out an IC from the mother board and change it for other and made it work.


I think you should do it and let us know the results.

[maxpiano]

P.S My intension was to highlight Nord users,its simple as that.

I'm not so sure...

Google and Wiki will help you...))

With what? I have a little bit of background working with such things, and have some ideas of what may be required. And all I'm saying is that it is likely NOT just a question of adding more memory by changing the chip(s). Nord may not use all available memory even if there is more added; maybe they have a fixed memory layout, since each OS is specific to one configuration only, as I said above. And maybe the system is not wired to be able to even address the additional memory -- there could be hardware limitations too.

But if you have a specific link you want to share to enlighten me, please do so. I'd be happy to learn something new

[Leo Castro]

What backgaard said.

Lots of assumptions in this thread, that just because a handful of non-Nord workstations can be hardware-hacked, surely a proprietary stage instrument can be, too. [headshake]

Look, I've been "off the beaten path" myself, decades ago. My Kurzweil 1000-series home instrument (furniture cabinetry, 175 lbs.) shipped with a limited OS, presets only. With some digging and great help from Kurzweil AND Sweetwater, I found that all their 1000-series logic boards were similar enough that I could swap out the "home OS" EPROMs for the "pro OS" (true K1000/1200 functionality). Kurzweil thought it COULD work, but they'd never tested that hardware/OS combination (hardwired pedals)... so no guarantees.

These were the days of socketed chips, so the damage risk was minimal. The retailer was willing to sell me the chips, and a printed OS user guide. Kurzweil was kind enough to share how to open my instrument up. If it didn't work, I'd just swap the EPROMs back, and I'd be out the cost of an OS I couldn't use.

(It worked, and worked beautifully. I was the proud owner of a 88-note, fully-weighted one-off.)

But what's being proposed in this thread is so much more risky. You don't have the manufacturer's blessing, you're hoping to desolder/resolder surface mount chips without damaging anything... with what you HOPE are compatible chips. The people most likely to know aren't publicly saying anything encouraging.

The risk/reward ratio is way, way off.

[someclevername]

2.The matter of fact that my Motif Xs accepts 2 gig memory instead of 1 as stated in manual. Thats why i place an "crazy idea" before i found another
thread which i gave a link to.

How long does it take to load 2GB of samples though...

[Ivan Jochner]

2.The matter of fact that my Motif Xs accepts 2 gig memory instead of 1 as stated in manual. Thats why i place an "crazy idea" before i found another
thread which i gave a link to.

How long does it take to load 2GB of samples though...

Never filled up to 2 gigs anyway, 1 gig loads about 3-4 min

[anotherscott]

How long does it take to load 2GB of samples though...

About 4x as long as the current 480 mb. Or, the same as loading 2 GB of pianos into its piano section. But of course (and luckily), we rarely have to load/replace all of it at once.

How long does it take to load 2GB of samples though...

Never filled up to 2 gigs anyway, 1 gig loads about 3-4 min

I think you're talking about something else. No way you can load 1 GB of data the Nord in 3-4 min.

Really, the only people who know whether replacing Nord's flash chips with higher density ones would work are the people at Nord. That's assuming that there even ARE other higher density (but otherwise same-spec) memory chips you can buy that are physically the exact same size, which may or may not be the case.

In general, replacing surface-mounted chips is highly risk-prone to begin with. There were often third-party memory upgrades for older Macs that allowed you to go beyond what Apple had said was max memory for a model, but those were on plug-in boards. When Apple shifted to surface mounted RAM, such upgrades disappeared. Even if they would work, odds of catastrophic failure in the attempt would have been too high. Same with the Yamaha flash upgrades that were mentioned. Yes, there are third party expansions that exceed the max Yamaha spec, but again, they are on plug-in boards, as Yamaha's own memory on those models is.

[Ivan Jochner]

I think you're talking about something else. No way you can load 1 GB

I was talking about Yamaha Motif Xs

[analogika]

I think you're talking about something else. No way you can load 1 GB

I was talking about Yamaha Motif Xs

The Motif XS series has upgradeable RAM, not Flash memory.
It's volatile PC memory that is erased when the machine is switched off. You are not increasing storage capacity.

The XF series has upgradeable Flash — at $400 (list, street price about $270) for 1GB (2GB maximum, total). But that expandability is built into the architecture, and it requires formatting the Flash card etc.