The video captures a presentation by giulioz on ‘breaking’ or hacking the DSPs of famous vintage digital synthesizers.
This process is both an intellectual challenge and a way to create unofficial emulations of digital gear that’s no longer available. Digital code is copyrighted, so – unlike vintage analog hardware designs – it cannot be unofficially commercially copied.
The presentation covers reverse engineering, finding out how vintage chips work and how this made it possible to emulate the classic ‘SuperSaw’ oscillator in software.
Video Summary:
“At The Usual Suspects, we create open source emulations of famous music hardware, synthesizers and effect units.
After releasing some emulations of devices around the Motorola 563xx DSP chip, we made further steps into reverse engineering custom silicon chips to achieve what no one has done before: a real low-level emulation of the JP-8000. This famous synthesizer featured a special “SuperSaw” oscillator algorithm, which defined an entire generation of electronic and trance music.
The main obstacle was emulating the 4 custom DSP chips the device used, which ran software written with a completely undocumented instruction set. In this talk, I will go through the story of how we overcame that obstacle, using a mixture of automated silicon reverse engineering, probing the chip with an Arduino, statistical analysis of the opcodes and fuzzing.
Finally, I will talk about how we made the emulator run in real-time using JIT, and what we found by looking at the SuperSaw code.”
UDO Audio shared this Super 8 performance by synthesist Hazel Mills.
They note that the performance features sounds of the Super 8, stacked and layered, and features the RBN-1 Ribbon Controller for the “sci-fi super sweeps.”
Details on the Super 8 are available at the UDO Audio site.
