Ensoniq ASR-X Project
I bought an ensoniq ASR-X, it was pretty beat up, sold as is, and looked like a nightmare when it arrived. I had my doubts, but at $58.00 it just couldnt be beat. $18.0 shipping? Fuck yeah.
So the look online was rough, the descrition was ‘as-is’, and it arrived as such.
BUttons missing too.
Booo!
So i sat down, made sure it powered on…. it Did. -good-
So i then starting ripping it apart. took off the top, and you would have thought an animal was living inside it. There was dirt, sand, and lotsa lotsa lotsa hair. So i pulled all the ribbon connectors off, and went to work with some contact cleaner. I cleaned all the contacts, the pots, the board, the memory slots, the pad connections, the screen. Then i went and cleaned the whole outside.
I picke it up and heard a rattling noise, it was one of the two buttons that had popped off. Now, let me rephrase that. I made it sound simple. The entire button and connector to the PCB had popped off.
So i got my soldering iron, some solder, moved a couple lamps over so it was lit up like Wrigley Field, and i slowly, shakely, soldered the 4 legs back to the board.
Put it back together, and that button works now, wooo!
Got some good news too, it has the most recent OS for the ASR-x, which is great because with the black ASR you don’t upgrade via a Disk, you do it by EPROM chips, and i really didnt want to hunt down new chips. It also has the maxed out 32mb of memory, thats the max you can put into the ASR-x.
Something i didn’t know, the ASR-x’s 1/4″ outputs are balanced connections, thats awesome, i totally didnt know that 
so whats left?
well im going to sand down the outside, the paint is fucked up, rust is everywhere, so i am going to pain the fucker black and neon green or black and flourescent purple. Havnt decided yet.
What sucks is that this doesnt have the SCSI in it 
my old ASR-10 that i retardedly sold to a friend has the SCSI in it. I wish i kept that keyboard. I wish at MINIMUM that i had removed the SCSI and kept that. bah.
anyway, i am thinking about adding a rom card, the asr-x can take one, and i am very intersted in experimenting with the slots on the board. See if i can maybe run a flash card reader in place of the disk drive. that would be dope.
i took alot of pics, i will upload them soon.
