The rigs we've created for chipsynth MD's emulation.
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended in threads on chip emulation as a look at how hard it is to emulate vintage sound hardware accurately.
What it is
A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dimatura · 2022-12 · on “Recreating the Sounds of the ’90s with a YM3812 Synthesizer”
I'm an FM junkie and own various pieces of gear based on old yamaha FM chips, as well as actual yamaha FM keyboards. I think the various emulations out there are actually pretty good, and I have to admit I'd probably have a tough time with blind A/B tests. Probably the most noticeable (and sought after) out of the "lo-fi" effects is the ladder distortion effect on the old Sega megadrive YM2612 chips. I own a MegaFM synth with one of those and I do love the sound. I'm not sure if most emulators actually try to emulate it, but the plogue chipsynth MD plugin does. The creator has a really cool video on it [this video] .
Recommends andrewf · 2023-08 · on “Nuked-MD-FPGA – accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation based on decapped chips”
chipsynth MD is a musician-targeted emulator of the MegaDrive's sound chips; one of the authors goes into the difficulty of recreating things at [this video] (From memory: they sourced a variant of the sound chip with digital output, characterized the DAC that way, then built a test suite to compare emulator behavior with a real chip)
Recommends H1Supreme · 2023-12 · on “Chipsynth C64 is an emulation of the SID so good, it can replace hardware”
I have the Chipsynth MD, which is a Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis) based synth from Plogue and it's one of my favorite plug-in synths. It's pretty remarkable how much it nails the sounds from those games. This video shows some insight into the development process: [this video]