surge VS JuceOPLVSTi

Good stuff!

I started getting in to this at the start of the year. Already had an old, dusty MicroKORG and MIDI interface to use it as a controller, but recently splashed out on a bigger controller as the Korg's tiny keys were hurting me - plus, I wanted something bigger to get better at piano!

A couple of free soft synths I'd recommend are Surge XT, and Vital.

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

https://vital.audio/

Surge (recently rebranded as Surge XT) is probably one of the most microtonal-friendly free synths out there.

Surge XT. Sort of like Microfreak and Hydrasynth.

If you want more power, get https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/ . It covers a -lot- of ground and while I can't sing enough of its praises, it might still be pretty daunting.

See if you can get Surge to compile on your machine; then try to add an oscillator and a filter.

As for free options - Surge also has a 2-operator FM mode as a single oscillator.

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/ has a ladder filter, and by following the structure of a Minimoog, you can approximate the sounds fairly closely, but that means going off the beaten path of factory presets and building your own.

Check this out https://github.com/bsutherland/JuceOPLVSTi

JuceOPL — a clean FM/additive synthesizer.

I ended up using https://bsutherland.github.io/JuceOPLVSTi/ since it made composition way easier than messing around with tracker software. I haven't really looked into extracting the patches from the game, but i'm sure it's possible - it did have a jukebox mode after all.