For me and my SC-88 Mk2, it shouldn't be too hard.

In the end, though, I am just impressed by the work that it took to create such a thing, at all.

- Alex

terrorinstinct wrote on 2026-09-22, 02:01:

Nice slop, bro. Somebody call me when the SC-88 gets an actual emulator.

17 posts in 3 years... get bent.

The essential roms are already found. the important missing ones are

1) the 8820 cpu and control roms which no one actually seems to have, though standins seem to be getting created at least for the cpu rom.
2) the g800, which is essentially a sc88 with some extra samples, and a full sc55 backwards compatiblity (it appears to have the entire sc88 sample rom inside it)..
3) the non gs jv 1080 and the other one.

Gave it a try the other day in various modes, including 88Pro with 8850 wave data . (Finally, 88Emu fixed the 8850's compatibility issues! 🤣).
When comparing 88Pro mode with Touhou EoSD's MIDI soundtrack versus Romantique Tp.'s rip from the hardware, I find it quite accurate and often hard to discern between the two. Similarly, in 8850 mode it was quite close versus my own module. I've not done a full test of 55mk2 mode versus my 55ST, but 55 emulation is more mature and figured out already. 😜

The analogue audio emulation is a nice addition too, though it seems it's a tad muffled versus hardware rips. But in all fairness it is listed as experimental, so I reckon it'll be improved upon over time.

I'll be looking forward to future updates, especially for things like the CM-64 (seems it's in docs already) and maybe the SC-D70.

zaphod77 wrote on 2026-09-22, 18:36:

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one. […]
Show full quote

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one.

https://shingo45endo.github.io/sc-mcu-wave-romdumper/

it patches programs roms to add a dump function, which will get you the MCU rom and wave roms.

i don't think it supports sc8820 yet, but it's probably possible to make one.

I can dump the internal ROM of the SC-8820, and I dumped all the ROMs of the SC-8850. However, I only own an SC-8850 and an SC-D70, so I need an SC-8820 owner to assist me in dumping its internal ROM.

mckuhei wrote on 2026-09-24, 15:20:

I can dump the internal ROM of the SC-8820, and I dumped all the ROMs of the SC-8850. However, I only own an SC-8850 and an SC-D70, so I need an SC-8820 owner to assist me in dumping its internal ROM.

SC-D70 is a rare device so it's worth dumping too.

The latest builds of 88Emu also support MT-32 (old and new) and CM-32L, derived from the defunct and never-released Nuked-MT32.

so you have to build your own to get that working?

zaphod77 wrote on 2026-09-26, 20:31:

so you have to build your own to get that working?

Not yet, a person has forked that repo, fixed some bugs and released cross-platform binaries, see:
https://github.com/keithadler/Nuked-MT32
Still the emulator is glitchy because it's unfinished.

yes wrote on 2026-09-27, 09:01:

Not yet, a person has forked that repo, fixed some bugs and released cross-platform binaries, see:
https://github.com/keithadler/Nuked-MT32
Still the emulator is glitchy because it's unfinished.

There is no need to compile Nuked-MT32; you can compile 88Emu, which already includes MT-32 emulation.

giulio wrote on 2026-09-22, 02:47:

> If you don't know how to do something, learn it or get as far as you can and ask another human being for help. […]
Show full quote

terrorinstinct wrote on 2026-09-22, 02:25:

If you knew enough to do all of that then why did you need Claude? This is an honest question because I am sick to death of people in the various retro communities using LLMs that only work by scarfing down the work of others and claiming credit for what comes out the other end for the sake of clout. If you don't know how to do something, learn it or get as far as you can and ask another human being for help. Otherwise you didn't build it and you didn't learn from it either, so in my opinion you shouldn't get respect for it. A snazzy GUI or whatever isn't worth that.

> If you don't know how to do something, learn it or get as far as you can and ask another human being for help.

I've been doing emulation/reverse engineering work for years without the help of any LLM, so I would argue I do know what I'm doing to at least some extent.

Some stuff I did some time ago:
https://github.com/giulioz/rdpiano -> manually done full reverse engineer from silicon chips of something no one else tackled before, converted that into a fully working accurate emulator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM_q5T7wTpQ -> manually figured out the bytecode for 4 different DSPs and coded the emulator with JIT even before LLMs were any useful at doing that

> scarfing down the work of others and claiming credit for what comes out the other end for the sake of clout

Uh what?? Which work of others didn't I credit??
As it states in the readme and in the download page, the CPU cores are derived from MAME, the SC-55 core derives from Nuked-SC55, and 100% of the reverse engineering work on the XP chip and on the SC-88/Pro/8850/1080/3080/CM32P is our own work, done by spending the entire last 2 year decapping chips and probing them with a mixture of manual and automated stuff.

I attached this time the work we did on the CM-32P reverb chip, where I spent multiple weeks of my life tracing every single wire and annotating every single standard cell type manually to get their logic functions out.
If this is slop for you, then show me something better you did yourself please.

> If you knew enough to do all of that then why did you need Claude?

Because it allows us to automate a lot of tasks and analyze stuff at speed that a human simply cannot match, allowing us to focus on what really matters instead of spending useless time manually fixing build environments.
If you think you are better than that, please contact us and join the team.

Thanks for replying seriously. Feature recognition is one of the few things machine learning models are actually good at without having to steal other people's work (which is why that application wasn't considered "AI"). I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with are the legions of script kiddie equivalents whose idea of "contributing" is typing an idea into a box, rephrasing it until the model spits out something that compiles, then spamming it on social media for attention; funny you should mention MAME because one of the worst offenders for this is MiSTer cores where the submitter clearly just prompted "port this MAME driver to Verilog based on the MiSTer framework" instead of doing the hardware analysis people kind of expect from FPGA cores. That's actively corrosive to niche communities like this one because the only reason the likes of Claude and Codex work on retro platforms at all is by scraping the hard work of established members like you, and now every random youtuber wannabe can suck attention away from "us" by burning tokens to spam things that kinda look like they work if you squint. The presence of a CLAUDE.md or similar pre-prompting for LLMs is a good indicator someone did this kind of vibe coding in my experience, hence my reaction. Since what you've done is clearly the opposite of that, I apologize; that said if you need to ask a frontier model to fix your build environment on a regular basis, you may need to reconsider your build environment.

BaronSFel001 wrote on 2026-09-23, 14:13:

terrorinstinct wrote on 2026-09-22, 02:01:

Nice slop, bro. Somebody call me when the SC-88 gets an actual emulator.

Was that really necessary? Lack of basic gratitude is what can lead, and has led, to developers quitting these sorts of projects before they can reach full fruition (case in point: mt32-pi). There can be room for criticism, but the least you can do is make it constructive.

I have no gratitude for sloppers. Again, since I misunderstood I apologize, since that's clearly not what's going on here.

mckuhei wrote on 2026-09-24, 15:20:

zaphod77 wrote on 2026-09-22, 18:36:

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one. […]
Show full quote

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one.

https://shingo45endo.github.io/sc-mcu-wave-romdumper/

it patches programs roms to add a dump function, which will get you the MCU rom and wave roms.

i don't think it supports sc8820 yet, but it's probably possible to make one.

I can dump the internal ROM of the SC-8820, and I dumped all the ROMs of the SC-8850. However, I only own an SC-8850 and an SC-D70, so I need an SC-8820 owner to assist me in dumping its internal ROM.

I have an SC-8820 but I don't even know where to start. You think I could be of any help?

stefanonimo wrote on 2026-09-29, 20:26:

mckuhei wrote on 2026-09-24, 15:20:

zaphod77 wrote on 2026-09-22, 18:36:

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one. […]
Show full quote

You can use a custom program rom to dump the cpu rom. I believe someone has written one.

https://shingo45endo.github.io/sc-mcu-wave-romdumper/

it patches programs roms to add a dump function, which will get you the MCU rom and wave roms.

i don't think it supports sc8820 yet, but it's probably possible to make one.

I can dump the internal ROM of the SC-8820, and I dumped all the ROMs of the SC-8850. However, I only own an SC-8850 and an SC-D70, so I need an SC-8820 owner to assist me in dumping its internal ROM.

I have an SC-8820 but I don't even know where to start. You think I could be of any help?

Do you have a discord or something else?

please try to continue the discussion on the topic at hand
the previous situation has been resolved , let's not keep returning off topic 😀

mckuhei wrote on 2026-10-01, 09:42:

stefanonimo wrote on 2026-09-29, 20:26:

mckuhei wrote on 2026-09-24, 15:20:

I can dump the internal ROM of the SC-8820, and I dumped all the ROMs of the SC-8850. However, I only own an SC-8850 and an SC-D70, so I need an SC-8820 owner to assist me in dumping its internal ROM.

I have an SC-8820 but I don't even know where to start. You think I could be of any help?

Do you have a discord or something else?

Yes I do have Discord, you can find me at .stefanonimo. hope I can help!

Now we have 8820 ROMs as per:
*** Please no links to such roms ****
The CPU ROM image is still a stand-in though yesterday MAME published the new checksum of the full-featured CPU ROM so getting it is just a matter of time.

Currently I prefer SoundCarcass (MAME) 8820 graphics to 88emu's:

Too bad they're using different wave ROM layouts so you have to have 2 copies of them apart - true for 88Pro, 8820, 8850.

yes wrote on 2026-10-03, 14:00:

Now we have 8820 ROMs as per: *no links to Roms* The CPU ROM image is still a stand-in though yesterday MAME published the new c […]
Show full quote

Now we have 8820 ROMs as per:
*no links to Roms*
The CPU ROM image is still a stand-in though yesterday MAME published the new checksum of the full-featured CPU ROM so getting it is just a matter of time.

Currently I prefer SoundCarcass (MAME) 8820 graphics to 88emu's:

Too bad they're using different wave ROM layouts so you have to have 2 copies of them apart - true for 88Pro, 8820, 8850.

There are this one rule against ROMs, like, no roms. Not mentioning were to get them either.

About 8820 rom, what's with the *, it's not a true dump.

"using MAME reconstructed cpu rom"

That seems like cheating.

I’ve uploaded all the unreleased ROMs to a corner of the internet; anyone who knows the site should be able to download them.

Karmeck wrote on 2026-10-03, 21:53:

About 8820 rom, what's with the *, it's not a true dump.

"using MAME reconstructed cpu rom"

That seems like cheating.

It looks like this was fixed after the true dump was made available.