The JP-8080 uses custom DSP chips designed by Roland, and Roland do not provide a Virtual Instrument (VST) for this much desired synth.
There's a hard lesson for hardware manufacturers to be learned in this drama.
If Kemper were supportive, they'd have a very clear road to a next-gen Virus TI (a "Proton"?) on the horizon .. but the word on the street has it that they're hostile to the effort of emulating the Motorola DSP ...
These days you can spend $1000 and get 8-16 voices without multitimbral feature. Hydrasynth Deluxe or Novation Summit in the $2k-3k range for 2 parts and total of 16 voices is considered good now.
Everything has moved to DAW centric workflows tethered to your computer and the hardware has really stopped innovating.
Previously, I managed to decode a firmware update file for the unit, but quickly found out that it uses a special-purpose DSP chip, and I wasn't able to easily find public documentation for its instruction set. So I gave up. Do you have a gut feeling on if REing and hacking this firmware could be done by a dedicated amateur, or is this probably more like professional-level work and I should find something better to do?
https://zoomcorp.com/en/us/digital-instruments/digital-instr...
For the LFO mod amounts I imagine the values are hardcoded somewhere, so it shouldn't be that hard. Adding a new UI for velocity levels or a chord mode would be more complex though. Even better if there was a Zoom engineer around here who could guide me a bit...
https://ajxs.me/blog/Introduction_to_Reverse-Engineering_Vin...
The ARQ96 is an incredibly niche product all things considered, but especially compared to the DX7. It's also ~10 years old rather than ~40 years old. It's a completely different beast.
Zoom released few firmware updates, but v1.x to v2.x was a very significant change. Are you using the latest version?
This is how some of the best reverse engineers in the industry got started, especially when it comes to video game cheats.
I hope you get a chance to work on some other synths in the future .. would be fun to see you apply your skills to, for example, the UNO synths, or the Arturia *Freaks' .. would be hilarious to see custom firmwares for those modern synths, some day.
Lately I've been working on the Casio CZ101. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll publish a partially annotated disassembled firmware on my Github, along with article too talking about its interesting NEC μPD7810G CPU. Mostly because there's almost no other information about the CPU available online, despite featuring in some prominent 80s synths.
Following Pajen's awesome lead, I poked around inside the Korg Volcas, but I didn't accomplish enough to write about it. A 16KiB EPROM full of hand-crafted 8-bit assembly is a totally different animal to 256KiB of compiler optimised ARM! One modern synth whose firmware I loaded up in Ghidra is the Prophet X: After Espen Kraft's video complaining about it, I thought I'd have a peek inside it for myself. Sequential published the firmware without stripping out the debug symbols, so if anyone else is interested there's a real possibility of progress!
I've been doing quite a bit of work on the Juno 106 ROMs but haven't really got my head around Ghidra yet. I've just been working from the service manuals for various versions (including the HS-60, which is probably the most complete scan of a manual) and the programming reference for the μPD7810. I notice that all of my Juno boards leave out the EPROM socket and latch that would allow it to run from external ROM - I wonder if there was ever an "upgrade" from an early version?
Your bio suggests that you live in Sydney, so it would be particularly appropriate for you to examine code that was written in Rushcutters Bay!
Its wonderful to have the Virus TI hardware working in a DSP emulator - one can only hope that eventually the reverse-engineering eyeballs will also tackle the TI plugin feature, some day ...
Lets see! An update for their synthesizer users is quite long overdue .. however, of course, the Kemper Profiling Amp is generating plenty of customers for them, meanwhile. Kemper Profiling Synthesizer in the future? One can only hope to see it, however it happens ..