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It's possible. A decent info dump about the DS3 appeared on archive.org in 2019, I just haven't sat down and sorted through it yet. I'm a little concerned the chip on the card with the information scratched off is a microcontroller, in which case it may be difficult to emulate without extracting its internal program, but we'll see.

Goodgreat DS3 is a clone card, you could potentially use that to figure out what'll be needed and Colin Holgate provided the mystery chip information for it

@@MESSDrivers Look up "goodgreat-ds3", it's an open source hardware clone, I think it might have all the information necessary to re-implement the DS3 in software

@@RobynVids Oh, that's fantastic! I didn't know the card had already been reverse-engineered.

It's not normal as far as I'm aware, but Olivier currently lacks good reference from a real MU50 (or ideally one modded with digital output).

@@MESSDrivers I thought it was the emulator doing the clicking sounds, I was able to hook this to my DAW but there's too much clicking and note playback sounds strange

@@Purpbatboi I realized my previous reply wasn't clear: there is known clicking in the emulation, you can hear it in this video. "Note playback sounds strange" is going to need a lot more detail to be something that can be fixed.

@@MESSDrivers yeah I'll upload it to my channel soon But yea for normal midi playback it sounds fine but when hooked up to a DAW there's seems to be some issues with the note messages

Anywhere with MAME sets. Google "MAME 0.264 ROMs" works, or just go to archive.org.

@@MESSDrivers I found it thanks for the resource that you provided!

*Deep* respect, sir! I still use my CBX K1 XG (owned since new) as my "go-to" sound module!

Very cool. Olivier Galibert did the actual reverse-engineering. I gather Yamaha's official XG softsynth for Windows had debug symbols or something to that effect and things lined up extremely well with what the MU's firmware was doing. He's working on several other MUs right now, I'll post a video when any of them come up.

So what's the story behind the SW70XG sound card? It was supposed to be an SW60XG but with sample RAM, prototypes were shown but it never came out.

@@atomicskull6405 It was discussed but the sample capability was streaming from hdd, and things were moving very fast in that domain already

@@NickHowesAstro Uh yeah I saw an actual hardware prototype, not just discussion/vaporware.The prototype I saw had 256K of sample RAM and loaded samples into that, no streaming it was basically equivalent to a Gravis Ultrasound but with XG effects. It looked as if they had basically just taken an SW60XG and put 256K of RAM on it.

You can route live MIDI into it, but the latency is not great.

The LCD is an SVG from, I believe, a scan of the service manual, so it should be easy to fix. I'll let Olivier know.

😂Nice catch!

@@MESSDrivers _Slightly_ off-topic, but I have a lot of XG MIDI files that use parts of XG which many people don't; like tweaking sounds and their envelopes, changing the levels of individual "drums" in a kit (the triangle is by default VERY quiet), etc. If you want some/all of those to properly check out the more obscure corners of your emulator, I'd be very happy to oblige!

@@caddelworth Sounds useful! If you have them available someplace let me know.

@@MESSDrivers Well, I could zip them up and send you a WeTransfer link, but to do so, I'd need to know an e-mail address for you (so WeTransfer can send you the link). It can however be a 'temporary' e-mail account you create for this specific purpose and then delete, IYSWIM? But yeah, I'd be happy to contribute sone of these files for your testing!

I'm not familiar with how forks work, but all of these synths do run in regular MAME, just with fairly obnoxious latency if you're trying to play them live over MIDI.

@@MESSDriversI managed to figure out getting a lot of them to run, but some of them have issues that are not showcased in your videos. i.e. I did manage to get the Ensoniq VFX SD emulation to work, but no sound would output when I tried to play it. I noticed the floppy drive emulation was outputting noise. The same thing occured with the Ensoniq SD-1. Did you have to do anything special to get it to make sound in your demo of the SD-1?

@@NUKELEDGE Those come up with the red "THIS DOES NOT WORK" for a reason, although there appears to have been a regression. I'll check it out.

I'd be very interested also in a compiled SD-1/VFX (I own a TS-10, but owned those two prior to this) @@MESSDrivers

There's at least one fork of MAME dedicated to making our emulated synths work as VSTs. Olivier is currently working on the MU100 (because one was included inside the Konami KeyboardMania arcade games), and we have ROMs for the MU80. MU1/2000 would need someone to dump the ROMs, including (obviously) the wave ROMs.

​@@MESSDrivers I JUST learned about MAME emulating synthesizers and I can't believe it took me so long. I really need a list of all the currently working/in development ones if it exists. As for the ROMs I'll see what I can find. Any plans to emulate the PLG cards or maybe even the earlier non-linux based Motifs? (Classic, ES, S80/90 Classic and ES)

I have a presumably working PLG150-PF, if there are non-destructive ways to dump the ROM I'll do it asap.

@@Xeraser2 I'm compiling this list on the fly so it might not be exhaustive, but the Casio CZ-101 and CZ-1 are new, and the RZ-1 drum machine and PV-1000 synth also work. There's varying degrees of support for the Ensoniq ESQ-1, SQ-80, VFX-SD, SD-1, SQ-1, SQ-2, and KS32 (all of them will play notes over MIDI but the on-screen presentation needs work). Yamaha-wise the MU5 and MU50 work along with the TX-81Z, DX100, FB-01, the PSR-11, PSR-60, and PSR-70.

@@Xeraser2 Anything dumps are available for is fair game. Unfortunately some obvious targets like the Korg M1 have the ROM inside the CPU and it can be fiddly/expensive to extract in that case (although non-destructive exploits for a lot of chips have slowly been discovered). dbwbp.com/index.php/9-misc/37-synth-eprom-dumps has lots of program ROMs but few wave ROMs (usually the program is a socketed EPROM that can be easily read, while the wave ROMs are soldered down which is not super difficult but definitely not the first thing you want to learn to de-solder on).

It does work, but it's a little wonky on startup. Is the source for that on Github?

Never mind, I see it. Let me answer some of your TODOS: 1) For ReadQSubcode, the data is the control flag, the track number (BCD), the index number (as you guessed), then minutes/seconds/frames relative to the start of the track, then minutes/seconds/frames absolute disc position. (M/S/F values are all BCD also). 2) All-zeros AudioStop stops immediately. CD-ROM Explorer uses it on the Apple II versions. I don't know if it affects the saved stop position.

Thanks @@MESSDrivers ! FYI we discuss development on the Apple2Infinitum Slack if you want to jump in. I'll pass these along. Understanding the "little wonky on startup" would be nice - our end, your end, does it repro with Apple's CD Player or not, etc. Again - thanks!!!

@@InexorableTash FYI, there's decent but incomplete info about this stuff in the IIgs 6.0.1 source, especially Apple's own CD Remote NDA code and the AppleCDSC media control driver. There's a SCSI commands manual for the Sony CDU-541 (the OEM version of the AppleCD 150) on Bitsavers: bitsavers.org/pdf/sony/cdrom/CDU541-25_AppleCD_150/ It has very similar but not compatible audio commands. Ultimately a fair amount of what I figured out is just from observing what the CD-ROM Explorer and Mac CD player apps want, and those aren't 100% happy yet either.

I don't actually know, but it sounds familiar. Might try playing it at Shazam or SoundHound though.

@@MESSDrivers I tried that with no luck unfortunately :/

A copy of the CD? I'm using Cowgod's bin/cue dump from archive.org, but physical copies come up on eBay occasionally.

S.D.K is named as _Saddam Kay_ !!

I had the same thought when I was posting this. Dot matrix screech is a lot harder to do well with just samples though.

SD-1/VFX use the 5505 "OTIS" chip. It's architecturally very similar to the DOC5503, but it can play both 8 and 16 bit samples, and it has bidirectional looping (which was the basis of Ensoniq's "Transwave" feature) and per-voice digital filters. The 5505 also was designed to interface with the Ensoniq 5510 effects DSP, which is where a lot of the power of those synths came from. Ensoniq licensed the entire SD-1 motherboard to Taito, who integrated it in their F3 System arcade boards and a few others. When Creative Labs bought and closed Ensoniq, they had to find another solution.

Yes, there is! A fair amount of work's been done on the MT-32; the SC-55 has program code inside the main CPU so dumping it first will be necessary.

Great! Looking forward to it!

Thanks Antoine! Your A2R images on archive.org were invaluable for testing.