Free Emulator Brings Waldorf Wave Sound To Your DAW
Developer Dave Whiting shared this preview of Wave Emulation, a software recreation of the classic Waldorf Wave, a hybrid wavetable synthesizer known for hybrid synth engine, featuring gritty digital oscillators paired with analog filters.
“Rather than simply making a modern synth that sounds similar,” says Whiting, “I’ve tried to reproduce the structure and behaviour of the original machine.”
Wave Emulation models:
- The Wave’s 250 kHz, 8-bit time-multiplexed wavetable oscillator system
- Signed mixer overflow—including the characteristic Waldorf “ASIC Mix Bug”
- Digital 12 dB high-pass filtering
- CEM3387-style reconstruction filtering, resonant four-pole low-pass filtering, VCAs and panning
- 12-bit stepped control voltages, sample-and-hold behaviour, saturation, noise and output coupling
- Three independent 16-voice WDV boards, matching a fully expanded 48-voice Wave
- The original 480 × 64 monochrome LCD and front-panel workflow
The instrument can also run authenticated Waldorf Wave OS 1.700 firmware. An emulated 68000 CPU executes the original main operating system, while a second runtime executes the genuine WDV voice-board program. Their shared-memory communication, voice-update masks, semaphores and hardware-register writes are reproduced and traced inside the model.
Whiting notes, “The oscillator ASIC itself remains undocumented, so its internal operation is represented by a behavioural model based on the Wave’s published architecture, firmware activity and known hardware characteristics. This is therefore an ongoing reverse-engineering and preservation project—not a claim of perfect, bit-exact emulation.”
Wave Emulation is available now as an open source project via Github.
