The Usual Suspects has made 88EmuPlayer available as a free download, a standalone application that emulates Roland's Sound Canvas sound modules by running their original firmware on emulated processors and sound chips. It is out for Windows, macOS and Linux, on x64 and aarch64, and is published under the GNU General Public License v3.
Rather than sampling the hardware, the project implements the chips the modules ran on: Hitachi H8/500, SH-1 and SH-2 microcontrollers and an Intel MCS-96, along with Roland's LP, GP, RCC, XP and LSP sound chips. Giulio Zausa of The Usual Suspects described it, in comments quoted by Synth Anatomy, as “a low-level SC-88 Pro emulator with sample-accurate XP and LSP chips, H8/500 and SuperH microcontrollers, running the original firmware”.
Supported modules and ROMs
Sixteen devices are listed in the documentation:
- SC-55, SC-55mkII, SC-155, SC-155mkII, SCC-1A and SCB-55
- SC-88, SC-88VL, SC-88Pro, XPGS/G-800 and VE-GS Pro
- SC-8820 and SC-8850
- CM-32P, NU-10B and MIIG5, marked experimental
ROM images are not included. The software reads uncompressed ROM files supplied by the user, identifying them by MD5 hash and file size, and the project says users are responsible for owning them legally.
88EmuPlayer plays MIDI files, takes live input from a MIDI keyboard or sequencer, and records to WAV. A separate command-line tool, 88EmuCli, renders to WAV offline. Other options include several resampler modes, a fast-boot setting, an experimental analog output emulation and user skins.
It is not a plugin. “88EmuPlayer is NOT a DAW-compatible plugin,” the download page says, and on whether one is coming, the developers answer: “Not at the moment, but we are working on it.” Synth Anatomy reports that VST2, VST3, AU, LV2 and CLAP versions are in development.
Via The Usual Suspects. Documentation and source are on GitHub.