You didn't say which synth. Most of the old ones I am familiar with had a battery that provided power for retaining the patches after a power off. This was in the days before flash memory was in wide use, so if the battery died the patches were lost too and had to be reprogrammed.

I just had a battery replaced in a Yamaha DX 7 II a couple years ago. It was soldered in. It had the same symptoms that you describe, the patch programming would be lost after a power off, until the battery was replaced. I will have to give my respects to the maker of the STeem emulator. All of my patches were stored in DX Android format, an old Atari ST patch librarian. The STeem emulator ran the program perfectly, even down to using my PC MIDI ports to transfer the patches back to the DX.

Thanks for the return. The MT 32 looses any new patches upon shut-down. I thought this was an mt32 forum. I thought about a large 9 volt dry cell battery back-up but meanwhile I have downloaded Dr T's editor. I'm hoping it will allow me to dump these new patches upon startup of my other program. I developed all these patches on the Atari ST using Midimouse MT 32 Capture.
BTW, using three MT 32's to emulate a dynamite Wurlitzer Theatre Organ flute stop. 3 Synths for one stop!!, must be nuts.

The MT 32 didn't retain the user programmable patches after power down, so you have to have a patch librarian and store them with a SysEx dump and reload them after power up. It was some of the other synths that had batteries that retained their patches, such as the Yamaha that I had.

This is the Milliways forum, the MT 32 forum is a few topics south.