Welcome to Garys’ Web Page    (Updated  May 2025)

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Smith Domain Incorporated

In about 1988, my daughter wanted to learn the organ so we gave her some lessons and she did very well, so I bought a Yamaha Electone HS8 with MDR , about 10 years later, she sold the organ  and about 2011 or 2012 I bought the exact same organ back, but the MDR (Music Disk Recorder) and a few other things didn’t work, I got the organ working well, but I had no joy on getting the MDR going again, I tried to construct a memory stick to do the same but with no joy, so I sat down and wrote a program using windows visual basic to try to recover the R00 and EVT files on the floppy disks created by the MDR, sort of worked, I have the files but they do have errors on them, I found out that another person (Mr. Robert MacDonell ) had done the same thing and probably before I did (not sure what language he used), so I could have not bothered to “re-invent the wheel” and use the “MDR Eliminator” he wrote, which is a very nice and revolutionary MDR emulation program which requires one to connect the HX/HS/HE/EL or even ELX to his/her Windows-based PC using a MIDI kit (I used the Roland UM-ONE) and it works really well. My version has a few different features, but, a few features I wanted to get going, I never succeeded, so now I am revisiting the project (2018), my original program was for the HS8, I gave that organ back to my daughter and I bought a HS6, the programs works on the HS6 but it does need a few changes to improve it. those who wish to have the VB.NET project solution is welcome to download it and modify it at their will.

I originally wrote this program for the Yamaha Electone HS8 organ and still works best on that one, for instance, I have 16 memory buttons on the program still but the HS6 has only has 8 registration memory buttons, it will play some of the songs saved from the HS8 but some haven’t got the full range of sounds so I am working on it to find the differences, below is the help file I wrote in 2015 but am updating it slowly as I change the program and I am trying to rename it from HS8 to just HS or electone. I could use a program called ”MDR Eliminator” (a very good program), but this keeps the grey matter stimulated

 I revisited the project of getting the original MDR3 going again, as it turned out, the floppy drive had gone kaput, I reckon it was because the power supply to the MDR3 should have been 10 volts, but whether it was original or someone replaced it, the power supply was suppose to be 12 volts but it put out 15 volts and this pushed the 5v regulator to the max, so I got a good 9 volt 2 amp power supply and it was good. I got the MDR3 working (mostly) with a floppy I found and it sometimes had trouble reading the disks, I tried many floppy drives to

Now for the next step, I went on and got a GOTEK floppy emulator from Ebay, it has a USB stick for the memory, didn’t work for a while, but finally I worked it out and installed it into the Yamaha Electone HS6, I loaded HXC software into it (cost US$15 and this youtube video tells you how to do it fairly well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tYjk9qEJ70) and then I loaded an update and that consisted of the parameters that you want for the specific brand of organ, it worked but I had to do one mod on the emulators PCB, works really good. Only one thing, sometimes for reasons not yet known, when you change to another floppy image on the USB, sometimes it fails, switching the MDR/emulator off then on fixes it!! On the 34 wire cable, pin 2 should go low when ready to show its low density (720kb) and pin 34 should go high when ready. I am going to still try to get it faultless. This I found is wrong for the MDR3 as on the 34 wire cable, pin 34 goes low when the floppy drive is ready, so I put a LED to light up when pin 2 goes low, as shown in the picture on the left and the circuit on the right shown below.

get it going, and finally I got it working by modifying the floppy as the Yamaha one is not the same as a standard PC version. From there, I copied all the old floppy's from one MDR3 to another using newly windows formatted (in the CMD prompt, format A: /t:80 /n:9 ), you can format them using the MDR3 but you can’t read them on windows explorer, there may be a way but I couldn’t find out how to do it. Eventually I had all the old (about 35 years old) floppy's onto the new floppies, then I could copy the EVT/R00 files to the windows PC. As a backup.

Below is the 3D printed enclosure I made for the FlexiDrive so as you can read the readout when sitting at the Organ.

This bit is written some time later in time, I loaded many HXC updates (created from the web page https://hxc2001.com/custom_fw/) and eventually the whole thing stopped working, I then found out, if you press the 2 front buttons on the emulator, it went to an internal menu, it stopped working if you press those 2 buttons when the USB stick was inserted, you have to press it again for about 2 seconds to get it out of that state, well the final state is that it worked properly and I un-installed the mod I did. I used Firmware base code version : v4.2.10.6a  and update HxCFEUSB_V3_8_3_1a.UPD. I need to do one more mod on the PCB as after to press the button to select a floppy image, it take some seconds to load so I was going to put a LED to pin 34 of the ribbon to show when its ready, there is a software mod that when the USB not in or not ready, it has the dots lit on the readout. I now have 46 floppies stored on the floppy emulator USB stick. I am also now revisiting the computer programming of my HS-Midi to work with the MDR3 with the emulator effectively in parallel.

File Extraction from .hfe format.

When you use the Yamaha HS8 to create a new file on the HxC floppy disk emulator, and you want to save that song (MDR_00.R00 or MDR_00.EVT file) to your computer you need to do as below:-

To extract the files that are in the image format of .hfe, open the DosDiskBrowser.exe, It can be also be opened in the HxCFloppyEmulator.exe by clicking on the "Disk Browser" button, to open the .hfe file you want to get the files out of, click on the "Load Image" button then select the file to look at e.g. DSKA000.hfe, this then shows you the contents of that hfe disk image, then click on the Save/Load button and it will show that it wants to save the file as DSKA000_hfe.hfe to the location selected, but to be able to extract the files out, I use a program called "WinImage.exe", so to do this the .hfe file needs to be save as an .img file, so going back to the "Disk Browser Save/Load" button where its saying to save file as DSKA000_hfe.hfe, click on the drop down arrow and it give you many types of files it can save as, pick the "IMG file (RAW sector file format)(*.img)" option and press save, then using your normal file explorer, you can see your files all extracted.

Whoops — I found that the .img and .Roo files created by the HxCFloppyEmulator could not be extracted, I haven’t worked that one out yet…

This is a link to a list of the Yamaha Organs ,

there date of manufacture and facilities