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.”

Availability:

Wave Emulation is available now as an open source project via Github.