Patching an Embedded Synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra

• MIDICtrl20_MegaCommand

  2 25 9.5 C

  Discontinued MCL firmware for the MegaCommand MIDI Controller. [Moved to: https://github.com/jmamma/MCL]

Hey Cesare, fancy seeing you here ;)

As the other comment notes, I’m not sure if MAME can actually properly emulate any music hardware. There’s a skeleton Elektron Machinedrum/Monomachine in there for example but it can’t really do anything interesting (although this thread talks a bit about how some hackers used it to help reverse engineer and ultimately create their own firmware for the Machinedrum, see my other comment for more details: https://github.com/jmamma/MIDICtrl20_MegaCommand/issues/88)

Another project which may be of interest is this emulation of the Motorola DSP536xx DSP, which was used in a lot of classic late 90s hardware synths: https://dsp56300.wordpress.com. It can actually run Access Virus ROMs pretty much perfectly and apparently on an M1 the performance is pretty good, it’s usable but crackly on my i9 Mac. They’re hoping to be able to emulate many more synths which used the same DSP but for now the Virus is the focus.

• HexFiend

  10 5,174 9.1 Objective-C

  A fast and clever hex editor for macOS

  

Shout out to Hex Fiend! My favorite feature is the template system[0]. It makes it much easier to figure out file formats for which you have no documentation. You write a little tcl code to describe the parts of the format you understand as you go.

[0] https://github.com/HexFiend/HexFiend/tree/master/templates

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• yamaha_dx7_rom_disassembly

  4 59 7.1 Assembly

  Yamaha DX7 Firmware ROM annotated disassembly.

Very cool! This is really great work! It's awesome that there's been so many synthesiser related topics on Hacker News lately. I did a similar project myself to disassemble, and fully annotate the firmware for the Yamaha DX7: https://github.com/ajxs/yamaha_dx7_rom_disassembly

The biggest hint I could give anyone looking to disassemble a synthesiser operating system is to direct your attention towards the code processing individual MIDI messages. The code is invariably is huge mess, however you'll be able to very quickly identify the operating system's core functions, since the corresponding SysEx parameter numbers clearly identify what functionality you're looking at.

Suggest a related project