well, i now discover that i don't have a programmer that will actually accept EPROM's but i should have a willem programmer turning up next week with any luck.
The board i bought from ebay has arrived with an MD16R 2.06 firmware rom. I've pulled out the battery and replaced it with a new one after repairing or bypassing a couple of corroded tracks. I've got a MD16R that i bought a while back with a board thats just melted beyond repair by battery leakage so i stuck the new board into the empty case and it sprang into life and appeared to work fine. In fact everything internal works fine, you can edit the sounds and record patterns etc etc, but theres something horribly wrong with the midi.
At first i thought the midi was completely dead but i hooked it up to Midi-OX to see if it was actually outputting anything and discovered that most of the time when i hit the drum pad keys it outputs nothing but sometimes it outputs note off messages but no note on's, and other times it outputs random bits of undefined midi data or even pitch bend or Key Aftertouch data. Which is odd as the MD16R doesn't support either of those as far as i'm aware. I've had it working perfectly for about 5 seconds but then everything went odd again.
Does anyone have and idea whats going on here? Obviously something isn't working as it should be but its not my midi setup as i've done a cold start on both my MD16RP and this MD16R and the RP works via midi straight away but the R doesn't. Its not the firmware as i've tried a MD16RP 1.01 chip and an MD16 2.05 chip and it shows the same symptoms.
If something is damaged it seems odd to me that the midi would be outputting anything at all let alone random data