I guess the biggest hitch to making a clone would be the licensing of the Yamaha wavetable Roms.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:38:

I guess the biggest hitch to making a clone would be the licensing of the Yamaha wavetable Roms.

There's that and, sourcing the required custom chips . Unless the "plan" is to reverse engineer their functionality and either emulate it or re-implement it on an FPGA .

That being said, it is way cheaper to get a functionally equivalent external tone generator such as a Yamaha MU50 (DB50XG is essentially an MU50 on a waveblaster daughterboard, AFAIK) or even an MU80 (MU50 is essentially a cost reduced and cut-down MU80, AFAIK) .

BLockOUT wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:22:

so a yamaha wavetable its just the same as a voodoo card or a gravis ultrasound souncard. They are rare and very expensive

Are you specifically looking for an internal wavetable card? Or just the Yamaha GM/XG samples? For the latter, one option is to get an external Yamaha MIDI module like the MU80. They are easy to come by and typically can be bought for <$150 USD.

The ROMs are easy to get, cause those are already decrypted and available. We even have hacked soft-synths cooked up by the community that combine the ROMs from different products to give expanded XG functionality. The hardware used in the XG daughterboards is another story, but they do seem to overlap with the soundcards that used Yamaha DSPs, so there might be a way to work something out and it could be possible to make a new Yamaha DSP-powered soundcard that has HQ XG MIDI from the SW1000XG card. Regardless, there is a huge pile of XG hardware modules available on eBay, so that will fill your need, unless a daughterboard is the most ideal choice for you.

darry wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:53:

That being said, it is way cheaper to get a functionally equivalent external tone generator such as a Yamaha MU50 (DB50XG is essentially an MU50 on a waveblaster daughterboard, AFAIK) or even an MU80 (MU50 is essentially a cost reduced and cut-down MU80, AFAIK) .

this, and you're not limited to only using it on one PC either ^^

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:55:

BLockOUT wrote on 2022-03-27, 21:22:

so a yamaha wavetable its just the same as a voodoo card or a gravis ultrasound souncard. They are rare and very expensive

Are you specifically looking for an internal wavetable card? Or just the Yamaha GM/XG samples? For the latter, one option is to get an external Yamaha MIDI module like the MU80. They are easy to come by and typically can be bought for <$150 USD.

yea, im specifically interested on an internal wavetable clone of the yamaha.
I do own an MU50, but having it internally is one of the things i always wanted, but impossible to pay during these years.

Just run the SYXG50 synthesizer driver for Windows on a dedicated piece of hardware! 😎
Windows 9x or XP can be run easily these days.
Just use an old thin client and add a MIDI cable and a driver that routes incoming data to the SYXG50 driver.
If properly configured, Win98 can be run in an emulator that's installed on a Pi Zero or an Android set top box.

I wish someone would reverse engineer SYXG50 and recompile it for ARM to run on a Raspberry Pi or something..

appiah4 wrote on 2022-03-28, 06:25:

I wish someone would reverse engineer SYXG50 and recompile it for ARM to run on a Raspberry Pi or something..

We need the S-YXG100 PVL turned into a VSTi. That's the last of the XG soft-synths and the most powerful. Today's multi-core hardware can fully use it to the maximum extent of it's capabilities and it sounds glorious with modern MIDI music that takes advantage of the PVL function.