4 ms·

I wonder if they're strictly emulating just the digital bits of the original hardware. I mean, the reason we have so many different VSTs for the same devices i

I wonder if they're strictly emulating just the digital bits of the original hardware. I mean, the reason we have so many different VSTs for the same devices is that emulating the digital components is the "easy", so to speak, part, while the truly complex and really differentiating part is the software modeling of the analog components - which also explains the difference in price between a free VST replica of the Yamaha DX7 and the circa 199€ Native Instruments and Arturia replicas.

giulioz 3y ago
It's true that the analog part is not easy, but from my experience also the digital one can be as complicated. Take for example effect units or samplers, they use a lot of proprietary algorithms running in custom chips which can be very hard to understand from the outside and get right. For example emulating the digital part of the Yamaha FM chips and all their quirks, or the Roland D50 chorus/reverb ICs, or the interpolation algorithms in samplers. Btw, some MAME components actually try to approximate the analog behavior, like for the CEM filter of the Ensoniq ESQ-1: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/ensoniq/esq1.cpp#L274 https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/ensoniq... Obviously though it's a thing that takes a lot of work to get right though, so it's just a first approximation
- RB_MAME 3y ago
  The availability of cheap logic analyzers and multi-channel oscilloscopes has been a big help with that kind of thing.