[Q] Roland SC-55/SC-88 emulation?

[iwasaperson]

Is it even possible? What would it take? Do we have ROM dumps?

I think every DOS gamer knows that the SC-88 is the MIDI device to have for old school games. Will there ever be support for it in PCem?

[leilei]

External MIDI modules would be outside the scope quite frankly, and would be overkill to have emulation of them within. and then there's the whole rom dumping thing and the fact there were legal troubles there was in the past for MUNT with its MT32 emulation

You're best off having a something rather SC-sounding synthesizer configurated as your host's midi device, or maybe even hooking up a real one (never tried as I don't have a real one to speak of). Because MIDI standards are nice

[commander_keen]

1. This would require dumping of wavetable roms and PROMs, which could be taken down because of legal issues.
2. This would require LLE emulation of the 2 CPUs on the machine.

I don't think Tom would be able to stand up to this one.

[t9999clint]

I think it would be cool to add lots of options for Midi emulation to the emulator, but I don't think something as epic of a project as SC-55 emulation should be taken so lightly as to be just a add-in feature to PC-em.
I think something like that would be better accomplished by a different team like the Munt guys.

[Alegend45]

External MIDI modules would be outside the scope quite frankly, and would be overkill to have emulation of them within. and then there's the whole rom dumping thing and the fact there were legal troubles there was in the past for MUNT with its MT32 emulation

You're best off having a something rather SC-sounding synthesizer configurated as your host's midi device, or maybe even hooking up a real one (never tried as I don't have a real one to speak of). Because MIDI standards are nice

MAME has LLE MT32 emulation, which no other emulator has, so...

[iwasaperson]

He could always leave the ROM dumping to someone else and not distribute it, like many emulators do with their respective BIOS.

I am planning on getting an SC-8850 sometime in the future anyway, so It's not a huge deal to me.

[t9999clint]

I managed to get something similar to sc-55 sound using coolsoft virtualmidisynth and a sc-55 soundfont.
Soundfont - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgy81YeZ-JQ
VirtualMIDIsynth - http://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

I'm still getting weird issues with games like Tyrian, but It's probably something with my setup. This is also what I use with my real DOS compy with a midi 2 USB adapter so that I can use my i7 to do the MIDI stuff.

[FredPJ]

Just to give you a heads up: Roland very recently released the Sound Canvas VA Software Synthesizer VSTi, which sounds pretty much just like a hardware SC-55 or SC-88. http://www.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_va


The good news is that it's possible to use the Roland Sound Canvas VA with PCem (using loopMIDI and SAVIHost). I've been using it and it sounds amazing!

[t9999clint]

Nice tip!
It's almost worth the $125 for the commercial licence.
I just might buy this.