Just a quick recap of an outstanding issue.

I assume the tuner module is going to be shipping is mass quantities this summer. And ver 1.03 will be available in early June. With v1.1 expected mid-late summer.

So for those of us who had ordered tuners when we ordered our Empegs, are they going to be shipped to us first, or is there going to be a queue based system in place (like when the Empeg first went into production)?

Also, is Rio going to have an upgrade process in place for hard drive upgrades? If I send my 36Gb Empeg to Rio and they remove my 18Gb drives and drop in 30Gb drives, either trade-in/exchange cost, or full purchase price?? (For those of us who are too lazy to source our own IBM Traavelstar drives?) Also, will the new Travelstar drives with the higher RPM spindle speed be effective in the Empeg? (Will the longer drive spin up cause problems with timeouts in the player software?)

Any clarification to these issues would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Smoker_Man
#080000449 MkII - 36Gb Blue

In reply to:

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I assume the tuner module is going to be shipping is mass quantities this summer. And ver 1.03 will be available in early June. With v1.1 expected mid-late summer.

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It was stated at the European meet that the tuner module will be available by the middle of July at the latest. It appears all the components are at the factory and it just depends on how fast they can get the things underway.

Also, the empeg store will re-open to cover sales in areas not covered my the Rio store(s)! It will be up and running before the tuners start to ship (hopefully quite soon acutally!).

In reply to:

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So for those of us who had ordered tuners when we ordered our Empegs, are they going to be shipped to us first, or is there going to be a queue based system in place (like when the Empeg first went into production)?

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This has already been discussed here! You will receive your tuner in the order that you ordered your MkII under the upgrade offer. The first batch of tuners will more than cover the upgrading MKII owners anyway, so we will pretty much all get them at once anyway. There should still be plenty left over for people wanting to order tuners from the store once these first units have been sent out.

If I remeber correctly empeg offered a drive upgrade process in the past, but that probably died with the empeg store. They will not trade in any old drives (what use are they to them! They can't sell them onto anyone else!). Email support and see what they have to say.

If the empeg guys have written their software nicely (which you've got to admit they do) the small difference in drive spin up times isn't going to have any effect - the player should be reloading the cache long before it has only a few milliseconds left to play. Actually, if you have the drive activity indicator switched on in the display you will see the the drive spins up well before it starts reading data.

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 6GB blue)

Just to add - Rob said that 1.03 will ship simultaneously with the new tuner module.

No timeline for the 1.1 release was discussed (at least whilst I was there) but Roger's (?) comment was that it wasn't ready in the very near-near future. I would probably not hold your breath for this one, but It's probably safe to assume that it's going to be this year.

Finally, 1.03 has *no* additional functionality over 1.02 *except* support for the tuner + bugfixes.

Cheers,

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

No timeline for the 1.1 release was discussed (at least whilst I was there) but Roger's (?) comment was that it wasn't ready in the very near-near future. I would probably not hold your breath for this one, but It's probably safe to assume that it's going to be this year.

They are working on some really big project at the moment that has to be in the shops some time in August (sounds interesting), and once they have some of the work on that out of the way they will be able to devote much more time to 1.1. Evidently 1.1 is finished, they only need to work through the bugs that appeared in alpha testing before they can make a beta release. There are a few of these, and I don't really think you will want the software 'til they have these out of the way (seriously).

All in all 1.1 (or whatever they end up calling it - Mike even wanted to call it George (M$ haven't even been that creative yet )) will be worth the wait. There are some really cool new graphics in there!

(list 6284, Mk1 S/N 00299 4GB blue [for sale]. Mk2 S/N 080000094 6GB blue)

Greetings!

Not True! How can anyone forget Microsoft Bob! The photo is real. I got bored one day, and loaded a Sun Sparc 2 with WABI and Microsoft Bob on top of it. It didn't live long, but it was great to see the Bob logo on a sparc.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

"That's not right!"

___________
Tony Fabris

"That's not right!"

Thank you.

I couldn't keep Bob from crashing on the sparc after the logo came up, but we had a camera around the office and took a few shots. This one worked out perfectly, because it got the logo without any interlace effects. We even staged some O'Reilly books, Diet Coke and a slinky in the shot.

A futile piece of software, but it did give rise to Clippy! How is that for a horrible way to remember bad software? Still an interesting experiment in user interfaces... (try typing that without laughing...)

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

Take a look at this little Bob satire...

/Michael