Emulating the DX7 the HARD way

plgDavid · 22.7K views · 2021-09-22 · 18:41

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Recommended in DX7 reverse-engineering threads as a look at the effort behind bit-accurate emulation.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Music theory, synthesis & production Demoscene & retrocomputing Computer architecture & CPUs

What people said

duniel · 2024-01 · Recommendation
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: [VIDEO]
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TonyTrapp · 2022-02 · Recommendation
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: [VIDEO]
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tgv · 2021-10 · Recommendation
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: [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.
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Sources

Video by plgDavid, played through YouTube.

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