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Comment by MomsAVoxell | Hacker News Reader

It’s great to see some synth chip hacking at CCC this year .. in fact, the synth DSP hacking scene has been great lately .. since the Motorola 56K is EOL’ed, The Usual Suspects folks built an emulator, and its capable now of running the firmware for many popular synths which used that chip:

https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/

This means you can emulate with full accuracy the Access Virus A, B, C, TI / Clavia Nord Lead 2X, 3, Modular / Waldorf Q, Microwave II / Novation Supernova, Nova .. and they’re starting to target others ..

There are plenty of other 56K DSP apps out there - not just synthesizers - so if this proves effective it could mean a lot to certain folks who still have big deployments of these chips, in terms of product life-cycle.

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This talk is by The Usual Suspects, and it's about one of those 'others' that they targeted.

Their talk from 6 months ago

https://youtu.be/reGeRiCkkNE?t=1521

Oooooh nice. I've been out of the synth hacker/tinkerer thing for some years... Any other interesting projects to check?

Zynthian:

https://zynthian.org/

Monome:

https://monome.org/

Two simply AMAZING synth platforms of the 21st century which push things even further than the mainstream hardware vendors are willing to allow. Note that the third-party clone market for these machines is simply exploding. You can do your own Zynthian easily enough, or Monome too .. or you can find a maker who will build you one for a very nice price very easily too. Both offer 100% open and extremely powerful architectures for synth hacking and the offerings for both platforms are simply astonishing. Worth doing some homework if you’re into it.

DIY more your thing? The FundamentalFrequency LMN-3 might be up your alley:

https://github.com/fundamentalfrequency

Runs JUCE plugins, is kind of a cyberpunks’ Teenage Engineering OP1, without the fuss and nonsense ..

Just off the top of my head. ;) Of course, the impulse to recommend VCVRack is pretty high (https://vcvrack.com/) as is the endlessly amazing vista and extraordinary capabilities of the Eurorack scene, if that’s your thing ..

Nice! Those look great. Last time I got around some of that kind of stuff was when I got a couple Axoloti boards. I think I still have one around...

Yes Axoloti is pretty fun, and I think the Axoloti environment was ported to Zynthian, actually .. so you might be able to use your patches.

Thank you for Zynthian, this is awesome. Any blogs or RSS feeds you track to get in the loop of similar projects?

PS - don’t discount Monome, it has a very different flavor than Zynthian and is in many ways more of a musical instrument. It’s definitely worth investigation if you’re a synth nerd.

There are plenty, but CDM is my favourite:

https://cdm.link/