Kitrinx
SoundFont 3 Spec: Opportunity for improvement?
For reference, comparing the respectable DOSBox Staging emulator, running at seemingly any settings whatsoever for FluidSynth with the SF2 version available here - to a physical unit playing the OST of Tyrian in this video shows a definitive opportunity for improvement.
The game is freeware by the way, available both on GOG and from one of the developers - and on top of that contains a "Jukebox mode" in its Setup to easily play any songs from the OST.
Among others, the popular MIDI tool FluidSynth supports the SF3 spec.
More info on this format specifically can be found on their wiki here.
Is this spec something that makes coming closer to the real SC-55 a possibility?
My understanding of SF3 is that there isn't really any practical improvements beyond simply allowing the sample data to be compressed, which saves space but otherwise doesn't offer solutions to any of the limitations that I'm encountering with the format.
A new project was born: https://github.com/skjelten/emusc
This is what the developer wrote in Vogons: Hi everyone,
Inspired by the excellent work you guys have done to decode the control and wave ROMs I have spent a month to see if I was able to write a simple emulator that would use the original ROM files to recreate the sounds of my SC-55. Considering the fact that I had not programmed for 10+ years and knew little about synthesizers it's been a pretty steep learning curve. Luckily the SC55 sound font by Kitrinx and NewRisingSun was extremely helpful.
The project is naturally in very early stages of development and currently limited to Linux & ALSA, but I believe I have gotten the basic parts to work. Next step is to figure out some kind of RIAA filtering and adding ADSR/volume envelope. Feel free to check it out at https://github.com/skjelten/emusc
Some of you might wonder why I did not just fork munt, but I found that to be an overwhelming task. I needed to start from scratch to understand all the inner workings of both the ROMs and how a synth works.
PS: Any help would be greatly appreciated!
