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by wrs 1516 days ago
This product line is not in the dustbin at all. Kurzweil just introduced the K2700, which still includes the VAST engine introduced in the K2000. It’s pretty amazing how long and continuous the Kurzweil technology timeline has been.
1 comments
cesaref 1516 days ago
The K2000 was ahead of its time, and is still an amazing instrument today. I'm intrigued to discover that MAME is adding support for it, which sounds like an awesome project, I wonder if I can help in any way (K2000R is still here, but not been booted for a while).
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tomduncalf 1516 days ago
Hey Cesare, fancy seeing you here ;)

As the other comment notes, I’m not sure if MAME can actually properly emulate any music hardware. There’s a skeleton Elektron Machinedrum/Monomachine in there for example but it can’t really do anything interesting (although this thread talks a bit about how some hackers used it to help reverse engineer and ultimately create their own firmware for the Machinedrum, see my other comment for more details: https://github.com/jmamma/MIDICtrl20_MegaCommand/issues/88)

Another project which may be of interest is this emulation of the Motorola DSP536xx DSP, which was used in a lot of classic late 90s hardware synths: https://dsp56300.wordpress.com. It can actually run Access Virus ROMs pretty much perfectly and apparently on an M1 the performance is pretty good, it’s usable but crackly on my i9 Mac. They’re hoping to be able to emulate many more synths which used the same DSP but for now the Virus is the focus.

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psobot 1516 days ago
MAME seems to have had "skeleton driver" (i.e.: very rough and unfinished) support for a number of 80s- and 90s-era synths, given that they're very similar to video game hardware from the same era. In my reverse engineering for this project, I realized that the MAME driver might now boot, but there's an extremely long way to go before audio comes out; the K2 series used custom ASICs for waveform generation that have no public documentation. I've heard that some folks much smarter than me know how to de-cap chips and reverse engineer them from the hardware, but I'll be extremely impressed if someone can make that happen and emulate those chips efficiently.
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