Emulating the DX7 the HARD way
plgDavidRecommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 months, 2021–2024
explainer · advanced · evergreen · 2021–2024 on HN
An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.
Recommended in DX7 reverse-engineering threads as a look at the effort behind bit-accurate emulation.
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3 comments from Hacker News
I would recommend Plogue's OPS7, they have put considerable amounts of time and effort into reverse engineering the original chips. The interface is a little clunky but it sounds fantastic. link Edit: a YouTube video about the reverse engineering process from David at Plogue: ▶ this video
Maybe the closest free plugin, but it's not on the level of accuracy as Plogue's Chipsynth OPS7, which is bit-accurate. The author has an interesting video here, with more to come hopefully: ▶ this video
Plogue, a Canadian software company, have recently released a (software) emulation of the DX-7 in excruciating detail. Here you can see part of the trouble they went through: ▶ this video . Suffice to say that they used a logic analyzer to discover gritty details that no other analysis of the DX-7 I know has ever paid attention of.