Released in 1989, Proteus/1 was the first rack mountable synth manufactured by E-MU, and set the stage for their successes to come throughout the 1990s. The sounds for the Proteus/1 were selected from the popular EIII library. E-MU’s idea was to leverage the gigabytes of sounds from their existing Emulator III sound library, slice them into tiny fragments and load them into sets of 4 or 8MB ROMs. This proved to be a huge success for E-MU. The demand for Proteus was so high the company couldn’t keep up with the production of these modules.

Proteus/1 contains 4MB of your basic rock and pop sounds including samples of pianos, organs, strings, horns, guitars, basses, drums, Latin percussion, and much more.

Preset Library
E-MU also created additional presets for the Proteus/1 in SysEx format and delivered on floppy disks. Each volume consisted of a bank with 64 presets.

3100 – Proteus 1 Preset Library Vol. 1: Fresh Mix
3101 – Proteus 1 Preset Library Vol. 2
3102 – Proteus 1 Preset Library Vol. 3: Textures
3114 – Proteus 1 Preset Library Vol. 4
3115 – Proteus 1 Preset Library Vol. 5: Introspection

Expansion
Protologic board with 4MB ROM by InVision Interactive.

Technical Specifications
ROM Size: 4MB
Sample Rate/Bitrate: 39kHz 16-bit
Presets: 192 (64 RAM, 128 ROM)
Instruments: 125
Polyphony: 32 Voices
MIDI Channels: 16
Filters: No
FX: No
MIDI Ports: 3
Audio Outs: 6
Digital Outs: No

E-MU Proteus 1 Operation Manual
E-MU Proteus 1 Factory User Presets

This procedure destroys any presets stored in RAM.

1. Hold both Master and Edit buttons down and power on the unit.
2. Once booted up into the Diagnostics menu, turn the Data wheel knob to Initialize.
3. Press the flashing Enter button.
4. Press Enter again to confirm.
5. Turn the unit off, wait a few seconds and turn the unit on.
6. Load the factory user presets from SysEx file.

NOTE: Some of the early models do not have the Initialize option. These models had to be sent back to factory for a ROM upgrade.