A blast from the past

Magnus Lidström81 635 views61 posts
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  • Magnus Lidström

    2013 is drawing near its end and it is a special year for us. First, it marks the tenth year with Sonic Charge and Microtonic (happy birthday little drummer boy!). Second, my personal career in music tech began 20 years ago in 1993 with the release of Typhoon for the Yamaha TX16W sampler. To celebrate we decided to take a little break from finalizing Synplant 2.0 (which is already very late, sorry about that fellas) and created a free gift for you all. It is a project that I worked on even before Microtonic but never finished until now. We call it Cyclone because it is a clone of a machine that runs Typhoon: a complete TX16W software emulator in VST and Audio Unit formats.

    Cyclone is a true low-level hardware emulator. It simulates all the important circuits of the Yamaha TX16W, including the main 68000 CPU, the proprietary Yamaha DSP circuits, the 12-bit sample memory and the 400kHz non-linear DACs. Cyclone not only looks like a real TX16W, it sounds like a real TX16W and it runs the exact same software as a real TX16W.

    That last sentence is worth elaborating on. We have not merely created a new virtual instrument with a vintage sound, neither is Cyclone an updated version of Typhoon. Cyclone features a full 68000 emulator that runs the exact same version of Typhoon that was released 14 years ago. This implies that using Cyclone will require a bit more effort than your average modern virtual instrument. But this can also be a very rewarding experience. Regard Cyclone as a time travel portal to an era from the past. The era of the monster dinosaur samplers.

    To get started with Cyclone I strongly suggest reading the FAQ while downloading the installer from our download page. Sounds for the TX16W can be found in various corners of the internet (the installers do not include any additional sounds besides the demo sounds for Typhoon 2000). We intend to collect links and files in this forum post.

    Enjoy and happy new year everyone!

    / Magnus Lidström

  • Koshdukai

    Happy birthday! And thank you for this time travelling gift! ;)

  • Heiner Kruse

    great idea. I wish I could program, I'd be so much into replicating an EMU E4 Sampler

  • J. Pablo Arceo

    Happy birthday!! 2 decades are quite a journey. I'm glad as I'm sure a lot of people are with you having taken that path. happy new year!!

  • iks

    Happy anniversary to Magnus and happy birthday for uTonic too, thanks for this nice old school emu btw...just playing with it!

    Wish a happy new year to all! :D

  • ss5

    Best of luck in 2014 to all Sonic Charge users and thanks for the freebie!

    Can't believe it has been 10 years already since Microtonic was released.

    Time flies by so fast... :mellow:

  • Espen Tørressen Hangård

    Fun!

  • Hugo Portillo

    Wow! So many memories! My first sampler was a TX16W, until until I could afford an Akai. But the first time I turned it on and fire the first program, it sounded so good!

    I remember struggling with the terrible Yamaha OS until Typhoon came up. I have to find all my archived disks imaged I collected, if they are somewhere. I had many classics in that library which I couldn't find anywhere else until this day.

    Thanks and happy new year!

    H.

  • Steven Lattimer

    Happy anniversary and thank you for this fabulous gift!

    Never had a TX but this thing brings back all the fun/frustration of struggling with my old hardware digital synths and their tiny LCD screens. I think Cyclone is the one piece of software that has put the biggest grin on my face all year.

  • clakes

    Fun-taste-hic!!!

    That's one awesome New Year's Eve present. :)

    I still treasure my µTonic licence and have a whale of a time with it: Happy Anniversary, you crazy drummer!

    Thank you so much, Magnus.

    Wishing you all the very best in 2014.

    :wub:

    love, Francesco

  • lossfizzle

    Magnus, this is absolutely amazing. Thanks for offering this labor of love. I was 15 years old when I took a summer's worth of lawn-mowing money and bought a used 16W (the only used sampler I could afford other than a Mirage). I always wanted a copy of Typhoon but I could never afford to get that too - so I did all of my work with this sampler on the legendarily painful Yamaha OS (version 1.06 for the most part, although I used V2 a bit as well).

    So I have to wonder - while this is mostly to celebrate your achievement and industry history beginning with Typhoon, have you by any chance tried loading up a disk image of the Yamaha OS in Cyclone's 16W emulator? I think I still have all my "custom" 16W disks somewhere if there's a chance of finding a modern floppy drive that will read them!

  • C-Samuel LEVINE

    Wow... at first : Happy new year 2014 !

    What a great annoncement and new in Audiofanzine, just for begining the new year : yeeeh !

    This is a very important thing today, to have VSTi emulation of real past hardware synths, you did understood this.

    So that lots's of musics works composed and sequence files (Cubase, Performer, Final, Cakewalk, "Logic",...) with MIDI tracks using the sounds. So you save a big "patrimoine" ( sorry for my frenchy english )

    And you give this TX16W emulation for free !!!

    Personnaly, i am not a past user of this exact sampler and, what i would wish you to do for a next Yamaha emulation :

    the Yamaha SY77 / TG77 in a VSTi.

    You should i thing do a payware VSTi for that

    ( with a limited demo :

    the demo would give only the half of the presets FM sounds programms

    and the half of the AWM ROM sample data

    and not load MIDI Sys.Ex ,

    the Paypal payed version would load and play all MIDI sys.ex !

    )

    As a home-studio composer, lots of my musics use the awesome sounding TG77 from 1992... but since a few years ago, my TG77 gives real sings of tiering (tired) ... tirering ? and some of my sample datas are gone ! click sounds effect instead of the AWM rom data ! So i have a real need for a software VSTi emulation of this very used Yamaha synth.

    The benefit is really to take for the future much of musics composed in sequencers.

    Another benefit is to plug all possible VST effects directly after the VSTi

    Another benefit : no more rumbling noises in cables

    Another benefit : no more real cable

    Another benefit : the reliability of a software. If well archived on many DVD ROM, SD cards / so on,

    impossible to be out of duty, never burn of a chip unfindable today in the world, always working,

    even in the future. Because VST VSTi 1.6 / 2.0 / 3.0 standard will always be played.

    Well : there would be the problem of Yamaha ROM copyrighted....

    So that it could lead to have to re-make some alternative way of doing the near same sounds with another electonical routing emulation.... i suggest that, as with some computers emulators, there could be the official basis software, coming WITHOUT rom, and with alternative version, but having a non official feature to plug a user file for ROM replacement. So that, if someone manage himself with alternative web sites or newsgroups or so on, and finds the good TG77 ROM, he makes up what he wants at home, not selling anything outdoors.

    Please too : make always VST 2.0 compatible plugins for using in all sequencers !

    Even if Steinberg don't continue himself with this "2.0".

    ( don't focalise on the DX7 because there is already FM7 / FM8 and others for this famous synth )

    Thank you for your attention on my wish.

  • aoVI

    Happy 10 years and Happy New Year!

    Thank you for this gift.

  • Jay Vee

    Pure joy to be able to use all the discs that I amazingly still had backed up along with other samples from the time - THANKS!

    I wonder if program change is supposed to work - when trying to change program from midicontroller/sequenser/keyboard it only changes to voice 001(000), or silent?

  • Old&Grey

    Thank you Magnus for this wonderful gift, I've downloaded but haven't had time to install it yet, I'm sure though it'll work fine.

  • Magnus Lidström

    @Jay Vee : I believe program changes should work, although I don't recall if I tested it or not. In Typhoon you need to manually configure which program change numbers should active which "voices". You do this in Performance Edit. Also bear in mind that not all hosts pass program change messages through to VST / AU plug-ins.

  • João Nicolini

    - C-Samuel LEVINE wrote:
    Wow... at first : Happy new year 2014 !
    What a great annoncement and new in Audiofanzine, just for begining the new year : yeeeh !

    This is a very important thing today, to have VSTi emulation of real past hardware synths, you did understood this.
    So that lots's of musics works composed and sequence files (Cubase, Performer, Final, Cakewalk, "Logic",...) with MIDI tracks using the sounds. So you save a big "patrimoine" ( sorry for my frenchy english )
    And you give this TX16W emulation for free !!!


    Personnaly, i am not a past user of this exact sampler and, what i would wish you to do for a next Yamaha emulation :
    the Yamaha SY77 / TG77 in a VSTi.
    You should i thing do a payware VSTi for that
    ( with a limited demo :
    the demo would give only the half of the presets FM sounds programms
    and the half of the AWM ROM sample data
    and not load MIDI Sys.Ex ,
    the Paypal payed version would load and play all MIDI sys.ex !
    )

    As a home-studio composer, lots of my musics use the awesome sounding TG77 from 1992... but since a few years ago, my TG77 gives real sings of tiering (tired) ... tirering ? and some of my sample datas are gone ! click sounds effect instead of the AWM rom data ! So i have a real need for a software VSTi emulation of this very used Yamaha synth.

    The benefit is really to take for the future much of musics composed in sequencers.
    Another benefit is to plug all possible VST effects directly after the VSTi
    Another benefit : no more rumbling noises in cables
    Another benefit : no more real cable
    Another benefit : the reliability of a software. If well archived on many DVD ROM, SD cards / so on,
    impossible to be out of duty, never burn of a chip unfindable today in the world, always working,
    even in the future. Because VST VSTi 1.6 / 2.0 / 3.0 standard will always be played.

    Well : there would be the problem of Yamaha ROM copyrighted....
    So that it could lead to have to re-make some alternative way of doing the near same sounds with another electonical routing emulation.... i suggest that, as with some computers emulators, there could be the official basis software, coming WITHOUT rom, and with alternative version, but having a non official feature to plug a user file for ROM replacement. So that, if someone manage himself with alternative web sites or newsgroups or so on, and finds the good TG77 ROM, he makes up what he wants at home, not selling anything outdoors.



    Please too : make always VST 2.0 compatible plugins for using in all sequencers !
    Even if Steinberg don't continue himself with this "2.0".

    ( don't focalise on the DX7 because there is already FM7 / FM8 and others for this famous synth )



    Thank you for your attention on my wish.

    I I would like to congratulate you for the excellent work. I tested and become very impressed. I had an SY55 in 1995, and have followed the evolution of Yamaha, and lately, the DX7 clones. I have several patches of the entire SY series awaiting for a definitive clone. I'm very interested, including collaborating with this work with some C ++ code, or patch conversion. Nowadays the main dificulty is to recreate the AFM elements of SY77/99. Other important issue is to recreate the hardware feel of the AD/DA and filters...No one, but you can do it...

  • Mike Key

    Here, a link for a demo about Cyclone!

    YouTube Video

    Was done, i imagine, maybe to say thanks a lot to the author or to know what the others think about it but i'm not sure! I have to talk about it to my psy! :-)

  • Steve Lampert

    Way behind the curve (I just downloaded Cyclone) but I still want to thank you for it and wish you a happy new year - whichever year we're in now ;p

  • Mo'Cheez

    Dear Magnus. I told you in another thread here that I had litteraly fallen in love with Cyclone, to the point that I was thinking about getting a real TX16W. Well, it's now done. My hardware TX16W arrived yesterday and quickly made me realize how much your emulation is 100% accurate. I was secretely hoping the hardware would have just that little something more, but they both sound exactly the same. To my ears, at least ;-) Congratulations!

  • Aart Brons

    Is there any change to use Cyclone as a editor (with sysex) for the hardware sampler ? That would be awesome !

    Cheers

  • Emi Lee

    - Magnus Lidström wrote:
    2013 is drawing near its end and it is a special year for us. First, it marks the tenth year with Sonic Charge and Microtonic (happy birthday little drummer boy!). Second, my personal career in music tech began 20 years ago in 1993 with the release of Typhoon for the Yamaha TX16W sampler. To celebrate we decided to take a little break from finalizing Synplant 2.0 (which is already very late, sorry about that fellas) and created a free gift for you all. It is a project that I worked on even before Microtonic but never finished until now. We call it Cyclone because it is a clone of a machine that runs Typhoon: a complete TX16W software emulator in VST and Audio Unit formats.
    Cyclone is a true low-level hardware emulator. It simulates all the important circuits of the Yamaha TX16W, including the main 68000 CPU, the proprietary Yamaha DSP circuits, the 12-bit sample memory and the 400kHz non-linear DACs. Cyclone not only looks like a real TX16W, it sounds like a real TX16W and it runs the exact same software as a real TX16W.
    That last sentence is worth elaborating on. We have not merely created a new virtual instrument with a vintage sound, neither is Cyclone an updated version of Typhoon. Cyclone features a full 68000 emulator that runs the exact same version of Typhoon that was released 14 years ago. This implies that using Cyclone will require a bit more effort than your average modern virtual instrument. But this can also be a very rewarding experience. Regard Cyclone as a time travel portal to an era from the past. The era of the monster dinosaur samplers.
    To get started with Cyclone I strongly suggest reading the FAQ while downloading the installer from our assignment help page. Sounds for the TX16W can be found in various corners of the internet (the installers do not include any additional sounds besides the demo sounds for Typhoon 2000). We intend to collect links and files in this forum post.
    Enjoy and happy new year everyone!
    / Magnus Lidström

    Ok thanks for the update...

  • Dj Randy

    Btw If someone here interested in such music making stuff like samples & loops.
    I can advise this 2 pretty cool sources u can find some vst on them too.
    1.https://www.looperman.com
    2.https://www.lucidsamples.com

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