Hacking The DSPs Of Famous Synthesizers

This 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.”

via Vargasz, Foom

9 thoughts on “Hacking The DSPs Of Famous Synthesizers”

  1. What an excellent insight. Truly great stuff.
    Still makes me wonder why Roland didn’t manage to “crack” this code and therefore release its own emulation of JP8000…?
    Oh well, it’s too late now, is it…? ?

    1. I’ve found the link in the previous thread to the roland website, but it’s just a bunch of midi files. Dunno what to do with that.

        1. Re “Looks like ignorance is bliss…”

          It’s only sometimes bliss. Most of the time it is not..

          Ignorance of lies and deceptions (=most mainstream news and establishment decrees) is bliss because exposing yourself to that is self-propagandization.

          Ignorance of truths is not, or only temporarily or rarely, bliss because it is ultimately self-defeating …. https://johnmichaeldemarco.com/15-reasons-why-ignorance-is-not-bliss

          “Ignorance is not protection from consequences. When you know better, you do better—but when you do not know, the consequences still arrive, often compounded. Proactivity matters. Asking questions matters. Research matters. Every choice we make carries outcomes, and those outcomes do not pause simply because we failed to understand them.” — https://archive.is/PLqhb

          The FALSE mantra of “ignorance is bliss”, promoted in the latter sense, is a product of a fake sick culture that has indoctrinated its “dumbed down” (therefore TRULY ignorant, therefore easy to control) people with many such manipulative slogans. Eg…

          ““We’re all in this together” is a tribal maxim. Even there, it’s a con, because the tribal leaders use it to enforce loyalty and submission. … The unity of compliance.” — Jon Rappoport, Investigative Journalist

          You can find the proof that ignorance is hardly ever bliss (and if so only superficial temporary fake bliss), and how you get to buy into this lie (and other self-defeating lies), in the article “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” … https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html

          “Separate what you know from what you THINK you know.” — Unknown

          “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people?” — John Mitchinson

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