(unsolved) Help! Missing sound banks on Virus B

[facecontrol]

I recently picked up a used Virus B. Love the thing to bits however it only has soundbanks A and B in the memory, nothing else.....

Would anyone have any input on why that would be, pooched ROM chip or dead battery perhaps ?

I've reset the factory settings several times but no luck fixing it. Let me know !

Feedback is most appreciated !

[Timo]

Hi there, congrats on the Virus B!

Ok, you may have either: 1) an old Virus B OS installed, and/or 2) the internal Virus B demo song is present (in place of the extra patches).

Regards 1, when you switch on your Virus the LCD briefly shows you which OS is installed. The latest OS for the Virus B is OS v4.9 (build 050), which can be downloaded here. Make sure you read the "OS490_readme.htm" file carefully to understand the update procedure. The Virus B is 15 years old, so no quick USB update here! It's all sysex.

Regards 2, the internal Virus B demo song takes up memory, you can free up this memory for six additional banks for a total of 1024 patch slots (banks A-H). I believe OS v4.5 and above already frees up these slots so you may not need to do anything more than just install the latest OS (OS v4.9). I think the 1024 patches are separate (the "OS45_second1024.mid" file), and can be imported after the OS update.

Note: Banks C-H are flash-ROM based, meaning you can't save single patches to their memory at any given time. These banks require full sound bank dump(s) if you wish to later overwrite them.

Any questions, let me know.

[facecontrol]

Awesome, thanks a ton for your reply !! Yeah I'm on version 1.5 so this unit has never been updated...

Appreciate you sending the newest OS across. Still struggling to get the virus to receive the update, I'm on a mac and using sysex librarian 2, keep getting error messages but I suppose this topic should be in a different thread.