giulio wrote on Today, 02:28:

For the SC-88/88pro, dumping the socketed eprom is enough

thanks, actually AFAIT, reading an old thread in this forum:

About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

it seems SC-88 Wave ROMs were released even here and in that thread also the de-scrambling sequence was found. does, the 88Emu need scrambled or de-scrambled dumps?

also, in that same old thread here:

About Roland Virtual Sound Canvas 3

combining with the few documented information here:

https://github.com/dsp56300/gearmulator/blob/ … .md#rom-loading

it seems some (or the same?) Wave binaries are found in the "SCCore.dll". anyway, as a newbie, I still think a little better documentation on that part is needed. I have SC-88 and SC-88Pro - I guess I will dump all I can from their PCB and try to build myself some "map" what is what.

giulio wrote on Today, 02:28:

For the SC-8820 and SC-8850 you will need to load a firmware upgrade that dumps the internal roms and the wave rom. It works only though on early units that don't use mask rom. For the late ones without the updater you'll probably need to do some microsoldering.

as far as I imagine it such approach uses some kind of Trojan-FW that makes the dump possible and I presume that Trojan-FW is not publicly available. so, I guess, that's out of questions. I have 2x (or 3x, don't remember exactly) 8820 units, need to check my storage room - at the moment cannot tell if anyone of them is using not masked-rom version of the mcu or not. I also have 1x SC-D70...

ok, kind of got it running with SC-88, just to answer to some of my own questions that I was not able initially to deduct from what I read:

Wave binaries are fine scrambled, it seems Control ROM v1.01 is supported, but V1.02 is not recognized/supported.

also, the Control you can dump from the device you own with chip programmer, the Waves you can dump using the following tool:

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

so, it's not that hard when you know it, but I didn't know it.

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

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.

totally off-topic, but please, could you look at the following new IC decap:

Roland MPU 401 Decap

and please tell us there your opinion as someone apparently very experienced - is it good enough for reversing? what tool you used for the tracing?

Would this be able to run on a RPi compute module 4 (CM4 Lite), making it possible to be used on a real hardware via the wavetable WP32 McCake, or is the CM4 Lite too slow?