A "JP-8000" in your DAW for FREE

video upload by mylarmelodies

"Meet the DSP6300 crew and 'JE-8086', part their amazing ongoing project to make the firmware in 90's virtual analogue synths run in a modern DAW as a VST plugin. FOR FREE. 🔗 https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/ 👉 / mylarmelodies 🙌 MORE LINKS BELOW

Thanks to those who sent me the lecture - it's really interesting if you'd like to understand how this was achieved!

MORE INFO
▶︎ DSP56300 Site (the plugin is called "JE-8086"): https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/
▶︎ Roland's Official JP-8000 Firmware is here: https://www.roland.com/global/support..
. ▶︎ Lecture video by the creators on how it was done: • 39C3 - From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: ... [video below]
▶︎ The DSP56300 donation link from the app: https://paypal.me/dsp56300
▶︎ More talks from them: https://media.ccc.de/search?p=giulioz


CHAPTERS:
00:00 This sounds familiar.
00:42 The sound, the feat
02:07 How it was done
03:41 Legal implications of ROMs
04:27 A quick fiddle
06:49 How to install & support it

39C3 - From Silicon to Darude Sand-storm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs

video upload by media.ccc.de

"https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-from-sili...

Have you ever wondered how the chips and algorithms that made all those electronic music hits work? Us too!

At The Usual Suspects we create open source emulations of famous music hardware, synthesizers and effect units. After releasing some emulations of devices around the Motorola 563xx DSP chip, we made further steps into reverse engineering custom silicon chips to achieve what no one has done before: a real low-level emulation of the JP-8000. This famous synthesizer featured a special "SuperSaw" oscillator algorithm, which defined an entire generation of electronic and trance music. The main obstacle was emulating the 4 custom DSP chips the device used, which ran software written with a completely undocumented instruction set. In this talk I will go through the story of how we overcame that obstacle, using a mixture of automated silicon reverse engineering, probing the chip with an Arduino, statistical analysis of the opcodes and fuzzing. Finally, I will talk about how we made the emulator run in real-time using JIT, and what we found by looking at the SuperSaw code.

This talk is a sequel to my last year's talk Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let's fight those with a microscope!", where I showed how I reverse engineered a pretty old device (1986) by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools. Back then I claimed that taking a look at a more modern device would be way more challenging, due to the increased complexity.

This time, in fact, I've reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. We used a guided automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.

The biggest win though came from directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip we figured out how the internal registers worked, slowly giving us insights about the encoding of the chip ISA. By combining those two approaches we managed to create a bit-accurate emulator, that also is able to run in real-time using JIT.

In this talk I want to cover the following topics:
What I learned since my previous talk by looking at more complicated chips
Towards automating the silicon reverse engineering process
How to find and exploit test modes to understand how stuff works
How we tricked the chips into spilling its own secrets
How the ESP chip works, compared to existing DSP chips
How the SuperSaw oscillator turned out to work


giulioz

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/h..."