Nukeykt made a SC-55 emulator

. Similar to Munt in the sense that you have to provide ROM dumps yourself, but after that you have a really good recreation of the original unit, complete with all its quirks and polyphony limitations. Emulates several variations of the SC-55, like the SC-88 Pro, provided the correct ROM dumps are supplied.

BotB already has MSGS as a format, and this sounds almost the same, just better.

Any interest in this being a format?

can we just have midi+ already

if mt32 can be a format, this seems reasonable enough. (granted mt32 does push the envelope just a little with the ROM dump thing; but hey so does channel F.) is this emulator multiplatform?

@ordinate: I'm not opposed to a more generic MIDI format. But in terms of keeping it easy for people to play back entries, targeting a specific synth makes sense to me. (There's potential wiggle room for people to specify different SC-55 revisions to target, as some of them have slightly different effects chains; this may or may not be important to people.)

@dami: emu can be compiled for Win/Mac/Linux but GH only generates Win builds automatically atm, so users of other OSes would have to compile it themselves. This may change in the future.

if the emulator is Serious Business I'm for it

ETA: after lookin' at the emulated warez of this program, I'd vote that either:

A. SC55 format happening is good and we should discuss what hardware is legal to render with if it goes ahead. I feel like the argument that it's too similar to MSGS can easily be defeated by the *k mod formats and many variations of NES formats existing. (We got two dang mariopaint formats!)

B. we skip that and revisit MIDI+ and what that could mean in light of the increased availability of GM synth emulation. I don't care for certain parts of my original proposal but I do know what I personally would want out of a MIDI+ in 2024... _{feel like mentioning that I'm a little against it now, ultimately... but that's another thread}

I am bumping this thread because it deserves a little more consideration than I think it got (and also because I just picked up an SC-55 MKII which means if we made it real and MKII was a legal hardware render I'd be like "oh, nice")

In my (thus far brief) experience, what it has to differentiate from MSGS is higher quality samples with stereo imaging, reverb (which includes different reverbs and a delay), and modulation effects (default chorus). There are also a number of sounds that are way more in line with the MT32 than with General MIDI ("Piano 3" is the first to jump out to me). It can also be tuned to things other than 440!
Another factor is that, like the MT32, it also deals in partials.

I haven't looked through the SC-55 sysex commands yet, but if changing the modulation type, reverb type, and perhaps the ability to alter global tuning and go into MT32 arrangement are possible with sysex, this would greatly increase the appeal of this as a format. That said, even just with the default "add-ons" over MSGS, I think this makes a great candidate for the fourth .mid (This all assumes that emulation of this is as 1-1 as MUNT to the MT32 etc)

I have chosen another hill on which to PERISH.

my experience is that when i tried to get the SC-55 emulator working i wasn't able to find all the different pcm/bin files or whatever. has anyone had better luck with it?

MAME romaets have them I think

the SC55 is way more flexible than MSGS, given it supports a wide variety of SysEx commands, so i'd love to see it as a format!

i don't know if i had a previous stance on midi+ but now i'm against it simply because midi really encompasses a lot more than just GM/GS/XG devices

the real question is what do we do about the sc55mk1 vs mk2 differences? to me it seems way deeper than just voice count differences; from my understanding some of the patches are different, and the CPU seems to be slower on the mk1 vs the mk2.

i don't think it'd be a popular enough category to warrant separate sc55mk1 and sc55mk2 formats, so i'd probably treat it the same as SID where the 6851 and the 8580 variants of the same chip can sound extremely different but are based on the same concept?

just my Two Cent's on this really.

I think both should fall under one format if this came to pass and both be legal.

I know I speak from a potentially biased perspective, but this emulator alleges to do both and the differences seem to be fairly slight in the grand scheme of things. Not all MKII songs will work perfectly on an MKI, but most/all MKI will probably work on an MKII. If anyone is voting based on hardware playback, they're probably discerning enough to notice an error that's because of their synth.

Beyond the SID example, some of the MUNT patches and the behavior of velocity values differ from the MT32 substantially enough that I've had people decline the hardware render. Also the MU50 emulator's CPU or whatever seems to be substantially more powerful than the real thing, because songs with lots of effects automation or a truly egregious number of notes in rapid succession will crash the synth or cause insane glitches but play completely fine on the computer. (Examples of those brought to you by Damifortune and myself, respectively)

somehow i missed that this exists until now and i'm really excited!!!!

If we do add this as a format, I made some icons for it that are based on one of the onboard demos the SC-55 ships with