First post, by mattw
hi All, I just want to give you heads-up that MAME almost completed the full emulation of "Yamaha SWP00" chip:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/s … sound/swp00.cpp
that's the chip marked as "XQ036A00" on your Yamaha DB50XG, DB60XG (NEC XR385 OEM board), SW60XG ISA card and inside units like MU-10 and MU-50.
that opens up a lot of new possibilities for people that are interested in the subject, for example:
* emulation of Yamaha SW60XG card in projects like 86box
* new standalone (open-source) MUNT-like or VSTi for Yamaha XG, replacement for 'S-YXG50'
* making Yamaha SOL VSTi using the WaveROMs from the real hardware [EDIT] (because now how the samples are compressed is known, as I read in one online article "Yamaha are truly masters at sound design and compression" - that's now clear to be true)[/EDIT] , i.e. the effort I started here:
Re: Yamaha Sequence Object Linking (SOL) 2
and subsequently abandoned unfinished. Please, note that SOL VSTi is not crippled like most SoftSynths - indeed it uses very crippled 8-bit samples, but it can be patched to unlock 16-bit, plus internally it uses 44.1kHz sample-rate, etc. So, with a little patching it gives real high-res audio output. it's probably the most powerful SoftSynth ever released after those patches are applied and probably that is, because Yamaha were using it for internal testing of their hardware disabling the high-res for the public releases.
* hacking Yamaha WaveROMs to include GS sounds from the Roland ROMs (still it's an open question how exactly Roland compressed the samples in their WaveROMs - in fact if you look at 'swp00.cpp' source code you will see the Yamaha way is pretty sophisticated)
etc etc etc.
So, a lot of new possibilities for anyone interested in preserving the old Yamaha synths.