Allright! This topic has been coming up in different places quite many times lately and thus requires some explanation.

I suspect there’s one or two bricked units around, DSP4500. These are floating and changing hands quickly at cheap prices because of this problem.

Jake, the thread starter has it right. The 4500 was the very first Eventide running system, modules and presets on flash memory so everything there is on NON

removable flash chips, not removable EPROMs. So… don’t even hope to copy EPROMs like it used to be the solution for many other units.

The 4500 on flash was the beginning of this different memory technology that very quickly brought to the next step, the DSP7000/7600/Orville marvels.

OS updates were now fast and cheap as basically it became a matter of downloading a self expanding application that would update your unit.

The problem with the 4500 is that it never had any OS update as it was a very short life product before jumping on the 7000/Orville series, a much more

powerful platform. A 7000 was 4x more powerful than a 4500. Orville was 8x. So no more reason to keep the4500 alive.

This leads to the fact that there was never an  application to download and update a 4500, nor to fix it. The code might be in the Eventide hands or simply lost for

good. Nobody there will do anything for a bricked 4500. That’s sure like night and day!

Solutions:

-what Jake says… but it would take some extremely knowledgeable person in even trying to do what he describes in his first post above. I’d just say “forget it”!

-a voluntary with a working DSP4500 who has the immense courtesy and abundance of time to download each single preset off the machine in MIDI SysEx files.

IF possible, these would need to be loaded ONE BY ONE on the bricked bastard and stored to a plugged in PCMCIA RAM Card. You’d need 2 or 3 4MB of  

these hard to find cards, but they’re still around. The machine can take up to 4 MB, not bigger. You’ll live by swapping cards to load a desired preset.

Or you simply keep the files on your computer and use a MIDI SysEx app (Sysex Librarian for Mac – Midiox for Windows) to quickly send any preset to the

4500, as its own memory disc. BEST SOLUTION to me!

-MAYBE and I say MAYBE AGAIN there’s a possibility Eventide still has the factory presets in sigfile format. These would need an installation of the old Vsig

program, previous to the later V2.x, and you could upload single presets to the machine but will also need the PCMCIA cards to store them. The internal RAM is

just very small. But Vsig 1,xx would only run on very old Windows systems, like up to XP. And running Vsig, the old one, isn’t for everybody out there.

Other ideas….

Any DSP/GTR4000 EPROM won’t help. Maybe their presets in MIDI SysEx format could help.

The ULTRASHIFTER V2.300 card has some modules and presets updates/upgrades in it, BUT it was never meant to be a “fix your DSP4500” tool. ‘m not sure it

would do any good at all. It was never tested as this issue solution and is very, very hard to find. It added the Ultrashifter presets, the MIDIclock presets, the

Dither presets, a set of  modules.

Any other DSP/GTR4000 card won’t do anything at all. No systems are on board.No flash capabilities.