the mu100 instruments do improve a number of ff7 XG midi files, actually.

Oddly enough, it seems that game was kept in mind with the quality upgrades. Still more FIghting's distorted guitars are much improved, for example.

When they did the XG MIDI for FF7, they did it using the MU hardware and not the brand-new software, so it should always sound better with XG hardware from that time period. Once this gets a little more baked and fleshed out, it would be great to see YT vid recordings of the FF7 XG MIDIs using the better samples that have been dropped in and then, move on to some of the massive pile of XG MIDIs that were made over the years, using the more advanced hardware options.

test them out in s-mu2k.

Try mu-native first, then try mu-basic. you might be surprised. mu-basic map s for midis that soudn wrong withotu it. always has been, always will be. if it sounds great without it, you don't need it. 😀

here's still more fighting.

sw1000xg (it's a mu100 on a card) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGLOqyya6Q4
real mu-2000ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8MGLBfrRAs

still, nothing beats the original hammond b3 slowdist organ sample from the PS1 original, though.

full soundtrack on sw1000xg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71TxIvlenZ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmLEPc1EE3U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8hkwHXu2kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COB4n-R2nN8

see for yourself. 😀 this is what you will hear on s-mu2000xg

In case anyone hasn't been aware of it:

The S-YXG50 panel looks like this now and the engine supports polyphony 256. Just sayin'. And MU50-1000 can be loaded with it. Some better, some worse, but they do work.

Oh yeah, and there's a patcher which just needs the ROMs and syxg50.dll and you get ready-to-use VST2 dlls as a result. Single files, ROMs embedded, fully portable. It won't get any easier than that. 😀

Trelokk wrote on 2026-10-15, 20:00:

In case anyone hasn't been aware of it:

The S-YXG50 panel looks like this now and the engine supports polyphony 256. Just sayin'. And MU50-1000 can be loaded with it. Some better, some worse, but they do work.

Oh yeah, and there's a patcher which just needs the ROMs and syxg50.dll and you get ready-to-use VST2 dlls as a result. Single files, ROMs embedded, fully portable. It won't get any easier than that. 😀

I tried it yesterday, with all MU variants.
It is very user-friendly indeed. The Windows patcher requires Windows 10, Windows 7 won't do, But there is also a Linux one. Anyways these are pyinstaller executables. the core is python (v3.12+).
In my brief testing I noticed MU50 and 80 being closest sounding to my expectations, of certain midi tracks. But the others are not far off, when configured as MU basic.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2026-10-08, 15:26:

Got s-mu2000 working using clear instructions from a website

https://moondoldo.com/wordpress/?p=14483

So now that these converter projects are around anyone up for making a .TBL to .sf2 or .dls converter? For use with something like Spessasynth?

I've worked on a python script that converts the 1x and 2x element MU2000 ROM voices to Bitwig Sampler presets. These are very similar to .sf2 underneath. They sound like recognisable XG voices, but they're obviously quite raw sounding. I got as far as mapping loop and tail, AEG, FEG and ome PEG. There's quite a few challenges though because several aspects of XG/AVM2 parameters don't really have .sf2 equivalents so even though the sample and envelopes are identical, some of the character is not shaped properly. I did think it might be better to do what i did with MUXG2K and bake some of the AVM2 goodness into the samples where possible so it would make the encoding to .sf2 a little more accurate.

Wasn't the real secret sauce of XG, the DSP-ish stuff (processing commands and such) that was part of the XG MIDI standard and baked into the XG MIDI data?

For the time, what was unique was the PCM was source material for a complete subtractive synthesis engine that comes afterwards. Yamaha's digital filter at the time was also what allowed it to sound analogue-like filtering. This is why merely extracting the ROM waves is only a tiny part of AWM2 and why it's so difficult to replicate in software too.