Roland Emulator
Barb Frison
I was wondering why it is that seemingly no one has tried to emulate the SC-55. Is it just due to the closed nature of things surrounding its architecture, or is it the possibility of Roland taking someone to court for even so much as using recorded samples of the SC-55?
In theory it should be possible to reconstruct a nearly identical sounding soundfont by skipping the output (opamp) stage and doing a straight recording, or better yet record the digital output (just before the DAC).
Roland did defend their GS tech in the late 90's, when they sued Crystal/Atmel (Now known as DREAM) for sampling their GS sounds - a rough equivalent to an SC-55, though some have said some SC-88 sounds are in there too - and selling chips that were marketed as GS-compliant/capable because they had a GS-labeled bank attached to the chips or in the chip itself and used GS SysEx commands in their firmware. It resulted in official licensing of the GS sounds becoming a thing - Apple and Microsoft licensed SC-55 equivalent sounds for their respective software products - and the company did an official GS bank that was available to license for almost all of their SAM digital audio chips.
I don't know if they would defend it now and they haven't bothered to go after anyone who did SC-sampled SoundFont banks, but I do know that the Roland VSC offerings were revamped because there is a massive pile of MIDIs out in the wilds of the Internet which can only be played with proper hardware that is beginning to become hard to come by and because Roland needs to milk their tech portfolio for as much cash as they can, since they are in decline. Technically speaking, they do still manufacture the Sound Canvas hardware and never stopped making it, but it's now only built into their digital piano line of products, which sell for thousands of dollars a pop and most likely doesn't get used for MIDI work like the old Sound Canvas modules were. Yamaha does the same with their XG tech.
Other than that, the closest you can get to real hardware ia Roland's official emulator (SoundCanvas VA), but nowadays it's only available with a RolandCloud subscription. But considering the original devices aren't _that_ expensive yet, getting a real one might be cheaper in the long run than paying the subscription (and probably more fun ? ).
Roland's emulator emulates a SC-8820, so the SC-55 map is inaccurate like the real hardware's map is. IIRC, some samples are different and the effects are different. Bottom line, it's not like flawless MT-32 emulation, it's somewhat accurate emulation but not the same as an actual SC-55.
Isn't the SC-55 pretty much a rompler though?
I'm sure there's some special sauce in the custom IC chips but it just plays what's on the roms so in theory it should be possible to duplicate what it does.
"EmuSC is a software synthesizer that aims to use the ROM files of the Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 lineup (and perhaps the SC-88 in the future) to recreate the original sounds of these '90s era synthesizers."
It was only 15 Euros (without PSU) but no guarantee that it was going to operate properly. Unfortunately, it was booting but I was not able to use the floppy drive which is very annoying. This was making it useless (impossible to save songs or settings).
After some years and a quick research, I decided that it was time to get this baby back to life. I bought a SFR1M44-U100K Gotek floppy emulator. Why ? Because it was not expensive, black and listed as being compatible with FlashFloppy. I was really happy to discover this alternate open-source firmware ! As you will see later, It was definitely a good move !
This page was written as a documentation for myself but could, maybe, be useful for others. Especially Linux users that are fighting with such a piece of hardware. I particularly like the DIY concept, especially when it comes to saving old iconic gear.
The Gotek seems to be often delivered without some of the required pins, so you might have to remove the board from its shell and had some. For information, the reference SFRC922D is printed on the board.
This was very helpful but i do have a question. Is there a way to edit the .img file to add old saved MC-50 song files that i have on stacks of old floppies. I also have a MKII version so i frequently load .mid files to be converted to MC-50 file format. Thanks again.
A Roland MC-50 kszlkemet ma is szvesen hasznlom. A floppy-meghajtjt USB emultorra cserltem. Az MRP kiterjesztsű dalfjlokat tartalmaz floppy lemezeim tartalmt be is tudom tlteni az emultoron keresztl.
Hi,
guess folks over here might be interested on the project I've been working on, so I'm making thread about it.
this is continuation of my early sc-55 emulation attempt I started in 2021. The basic idea was to emulate all main chips in proper way and use original SC-55 firmware as is (MAME approach). Back then I made emulator of its main CPU but was not able to properly boot firmware on it, and combined with lack of information about PCM chip I ultimately abandoned it.
Earlier this year though I decided to try tinker with this a bit more, and tried to trace die shot of decapped pcm chip (from John McMaster/siliconpr0n.org). After completing tracing I used org/ogamespec's deroute utility to convert netlist to verilog code and I started analyzing it. Analysis revealed a lot of useful info on how synthesis engine works, and how PCM chips is interfaced by CPU. Using this new info I revived my old code and started fixing it. Eventually I was able to boot firmware and then started adding PCM chip emulation. At the moment PCM chip emulation is halfway done and it already sounds awesome. Now stuff like TVF, chorus/reverb/mixing are left.
I know the objective is to emulate the device as close to 100% as possible, but can you add in a selectable feature to increase the polyphony from the default 28 voices? This would make it better than the original as music that requires more than 28 voice polyphony will play properly. A lot of the Warcraft 2 tracks for instance drop notes when played on a real SC-55.
not possible with approach I use I guess, all code inside firmware assumes 28 voices and pcm chip has hard limit of 28 voices (curiosly, on original sc-55 pcm chip DOES support 28 voices, it is just firmware is compiled to work with 24). SC-55 firmware does fair amount of the processing actually (all midi->voice/partial conversion, envelope/volume/filter control, LFOs/frequency control, etc, etc), pcm chip on other hand plays samples from ROM, does envelope interpolation and applies some effects
Just wondering are you planning to include mk1 emulation? , since some games make use of capital tone fallback.
I'm guessing both synths are pretty similar but I'm not sure how trivial it would be to cover both units?
Can you already make a guesstimate on what will be necessary to run this (i.e. on a retro rocket alongside a game, dedicated raspi ("sc55-pi"), full blown current gen pc, ...), or is it too early for that?
SC-55 firmware does fair amount of the processing actually (all midi->voice/partial conversion, envelope/volume/filter control, LFOs/frequency control, etc, etc), pcm chip on other hand plays samples from ROM, does envelope interpolation and applies some effects
Not "very close", or "99% there" -- the results are virtually indistinguishable from my real hardware recordings. I've been A/B comparing Nuked-SC55 with my FLAC recordings in my high-quality studio headphones for the last hour and I just can't wipe the grin off my face -- this is perfect, this is the endgame.
Nuked-SC55 is in fact better than SCVA for SC-55 emulation purposes, although we know that's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as SCVA can only give you the SC-55 compatibility mode of the Roland SC-8820 (which I assume it emulates accurately, but Roland's own "SC-55 compatibility" mode diverges slightly from the original SC-55).
Unless someone can prove that sharing the copyrighted Roland ROM is legal then I suggest you take the discussion of such elsewhere.
Text in posts asking for, suggesting on where to get, linking to or offering to dump a copyrighted Roland ROM have been removed.
Projects that have been shown to allow the above should not be mentioned here either.
Repeat offenders will be banned.
The above is not negotiable, no further discussion in this thread on the above unless the proof is provided. Any off-topic posts will be deleted.
It's some kind of init bug, it appears to happen based on what game you ran first, it's like some of them don't initialize SC-55 properly. You need to do the reset procedure if you run into this:
1) Press Q to turn it off.
2) Press and hold Y and U, then press Q to turn it back on.
3) Press W to answer affirmative to the reset prompt.