I made a little tool to generate SysEx data that displays images on the Roland SoundCanvas. I’ll release this soon. Here’s a little demo of it in action using the infamous Bad Apple video: https://youtu.be/Zo_cl_YtTqs
That's awesome! Nice job!
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
Fun stuff. I assume your tool converts a video to sysex frame by frame? Being standard Roland sysex, it should work on other modules as well, such as my beloved CureSynth.
CM-64, CM-500, SC-55MkII, SC-88 Pro, SY22, TG100, MU2000EX, PLG100-SG, PLG150-DR, PLG150-AN, SG01k, NS5R, GZ-50M, SN-U110-07, SN-U110-10, Pocket Studio 5, DreamBlaster S2, X2, McFly, E-Wave, QWave, CrystalBlaster C2, Yucatan FX, BeepBlaster, SuperOctet!
It does - I’m not sure what the full support list is, but I’m aware that some Yamaha modules that unofficially support GS will also display it though I’ve not had a chance to test this yet. One thing I did discover is that the SC-88 and newer can have delta frame information sent to them rather than full frames, so depending on the content you can save quite a good amount of space which lowers the data rate and allows for better playback on some devices such as the SB-55.
SC-8850 has support for this but filling the entire 160x64 display.
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That's fascinating, I didn't realise that Roland had actually updated it for the 8850! Do you have a copy of the MIDI file that displays that animation? I'd love to take a look at it.
RichB93 wrote on 2026-06-27, 23:00:That's fascinating, I didn't realise that Roland had actually updated it for the 8850! Do you have a copy of the MIDI file that displays that animation? I'd love to take a look at it.
I don't have the MIDI but I DO have a generator, but someone used Gemini on a fork of it for better performance but it wasn't published
https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/o … &visit_type=git
Basically on 8850 you can do both the 16x16 (which like older SCs will show on the volume bars) and the 160x64 mode. Also based on the Bubble System cover, it IS possible to send music data at the same time as you can do at 16x16. Also later SCs support uploading frames in advance as well as differential transmission where you can only send the changed pixels. 160x64 Bad Apple is perfectly recognizable, based on FFMPEG tests.
Oh and via Section 11 of the SF2 spec in my planned GS ROMpler, I'd have the user display be 96x144, allowing for 6 ports and volume of 0-127, plus 16px of text. This would be to host my X-Face + Face headers at https://stgiga.github.io/stgiga8.xface and https://stgiga.github.io/LushFace.gif
At 23K it can reasonably transmit over MIDI and it can live in the text section and it supports color. So 96x144 is my take on the whole arrangement.
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