Retromulator 1.0 is the initial release of DiscoDSP's hardware synthesizer emulation plugin. The virtual analog synths run on a cycle-accurate Motorola DSP 56300, while the Yamaha DX7 runs a full emulation of its Hitachi HD6303R sub-CPU and Yamaha YM21280/YM21290 EGS/OPS chip set. Supported synths include the Yamaha DX7, Access Virus ABC/TI, Waldorf MicroQ, Waldorf XT, Nord Lead 2X, and Roland JP-8000 — available on macOS, Windows, and Linux as AU, VST3, and Standalone.
Synthesizer Engines
Yamaha DX7 emulation via VDX7 — full hardware-level emulation of the Hitachi HD6303R sub-CPU, Yamaha YM21280 EGS (Envelope Generator), and YM21290 OPS (Operator) chip set with 16 KB firmware ROM and 32 KB factory voice data
Waldorf MicroQ and XT emulation via dsp56300 cycle-accurate DSP engine with folder-per-bank ROM loading
Access Virus ABC and TI emulation with sysex patch loading and ROM preset extraction to bank combo
Roland JP-8000 (JE-8086) emulation with ROM preset extraction, patch browsing, multi-performance bank loading, and AU MIDI latency fix running at 44100 Hz
Nord Lead 2X (N2X) emulation with per-program sysex navigation, edit buffer patch support, and output level correction by summing DSP A and DSP B voices at full scale
SRC (sample rate conversion) with high-quality Rolloff 0.97 / Beta 9 settings
Firmware & ROM Management
Browse dialog accepts .bin, .mid, and .zip files; ZIP archives are extracted flat to the ROM folder with automatic multi-synth detection — all recognised firmware files are saved in one pass
Required ROM files per synth (filename is not checked — any file of the correct size and content is accepted):
Yamaha DX7 — dx7_rom.bin (16 KB firmware ROM + 32 KB factory voice data)
Virus ABC/C — virus_c.bin (512 KB)
Virus TI — virus_ti.bin (6–9 MB)
Waldorf MicroQ — micro_q.bin (512 KB); can be assembled automatically from the original firmware MIDI dump
Waldorf XT — xt.bin (256 KB); can be assembled automatically from two 128 KB IC dump files
Nord Lead 2X — nord_lead_2x.bin (512 KB)
Roland JP-8000 — jp8000.bin (512 KB); can be assembled automatically from 8 original firmware MIDI dump files
Assembled ROM binaries are written to the ROM folder and source MIDI/IC dumps deleted, so subsequent launches load instantly from a single .bin
Firmware-missing browse flow on synth type change with synth-specific instructions
Per-synth patch name extraction and bank/program combo selectors
Plugin & Standalone
AU, VST3, and Standalone plugin formats with DAW state persistence
Resizable editor window with aspect ratio enforcement and in-editor corner resizer for AU host resize support
Window size persists across DAW sessions
DAW notified of state changes on preset and synth updates