dsp56300/gearmulator 2.2.25 on GitHub

Release Notes

2.2.25:

88emuPlayer:

[Fix] MIDI Player: Loading a MIDI file whose SysEx or Meta event is cut short
by the end of the file, or by a track chunk that is shorter than its
contents, no longer reads past the data or terminates the player.
[Fix] ROMs: Make the VEGS-Pro support the SC-88Pro waveroms as well.

2.2.24:

Framework:

[Fix] The patch manager could hang the interface for minutes on folders
with tens of thousands of patch files.
[Fix] DSPBridge: The server took the port of its UDP connection from the
TCP port setting.
[Fix] DSPBridge: When a device did not start on the server, the connection
hung. The server now refuses the device instead.

Osirus:

[Imp] The part list now shows per-part MIDI activity indicators, same as
OsTIrus.

88emuPlayer:

[Fix] MIDI: Deliver System DT1 messages to the SC-88, SC-88VL and SC-88Pro
firmware, restoring per-part CHANNEL MSG RX PORT assignments and
System Mode Set. Individual parts can layer from the same MIDI input.

2.2.23:

88emuPlayer:

[New] MIDI Player: The standalone now restores the last playlist automatically.
Right-click the playlist to load or save portable .m3u / .m3u8
playlist files, or add/drop one to append its entries.
[Fix] MIDI Player: Prevent shortened opening notes in songs with dense
initial instrument setup. Send safe opening setup ahead of playback
and let cleanup finish even when the per-song reset is off.
[Fix] MIDI Player: Recomposer RCP Track Exclusive messages now read their
SysEx payload from F7 continuation records, so SC-88Pro setup data is
no longer prefixed with invalid bytes and discarded.
[Imp] MIDI: Command-line MIDI input options can now assign inputs to
groups A-D with --midi-in-a through --midi-in-d. --midi-in
remains the group-A shorthand.
[Imp] UI: The CM-32P PCM card image can be chosen in the settings and is
remembered, instead of only through the --pcm-card launch option.
[Fix] Devices: The front-panel POWER switch and Q shortcut now use standby
on the SC-55, SC-55mkII, SC-155, SC-155mkII and SC-88VL.
[New] Devices: Added experimental support for NU-10B and MIIG5 (GM mode only).

2.2.22:

88emuPlayer:

[Imp] UI: The Settings panel has now a more readable font size.
[Fix] UI: Restore the standard window border color.
[Fix] UI: Correct the SC-88Pro USER INST / EFX indicator to display green,
red or amber according to the front-panel LED controls.
[Imp] Devices: The PWM-controlled VCA in the CM-32P is now modelled.
[Fix] Devices: LP chip emulation was using a wrong scaling factor that was
affecting the total output volume.
[Fix] Audio: Avoid waiting for the user interface when processing front-panel
input and updating the display from the audio thread.
[Fix] MIDI: Preserve outgoing MIDI timing within audio blocks, including when
analog output emulation uses oversampling.
[Fix] MIDI Player: Clear sustained and releasing notes on transport changes
even after an All Notes Off message.
[Fix] MIDI Player: Wait longer after the per-song reset before starting the
song. The previous pause was shorter than the reset itself takes to
reach the device, so songs that set up every part on their first tick
lost the notes at their start.
[Fix] macOS: Restore software rendering when Metal initialization fails,
removing the native Metal view that could leave the window black.
[Fix] macOS: Support GPUs requiring 4x instead of 2x Metal antialiasing and
correct Metal texture transfers and unsupported OpenGL calls.
[Fix] macOS: Release Metal resources when closing or recreating the interface
to prevent graphics memory usage from growing.
[Imp] ROMs: Added support for the SC-88Pro correct wave set as 5 separate chips.

2.2.21:

Framework:

[Fix] BUG-10355 After switching to another ROM, the patch manager could keep
offering the presets of the previous ROM, taken from its cache, instead
of the ones of the ROM that is loaded. Tags, favourites, renames and
MIDI bank numbers of ROM presets and banks are kept.
[Fix] BUG-10323 Plugin windows could open at their smallest possible size
and stay that small every time they were opened again. When a host,
the window manager or a display change asked for a smaller window
than that, the result was remembered as the chosen scale. It no
longer is, and a window that was saved that small opens at 100%.
[Imp] BUG-10322 The skin canvas supports more of the HTML5 2D drawing
context: linear and radial gradients (createLinearGradient,
createRadialGradient, addColorStop), clip, clearRect, lineJoin,
lineCap and ctx.canvas, the canvas element being drawn, whose
client_width and client_height give its size in pixels. strokeRect
now centres its outline on the rectangle, as HTML5 does.
[Imp] DSPBridge: The server is no longer limited to plugins of its own
version. It can host any plugin version that uses the same bridge
protocol, so new plugin versions can be copied into the server's
plugins folder next to the old ones without reinstalling the server.
A client still gets the exact plugin version it asks for.
[Fix] DSPBridge: On Windows, the server could corrupt memory and crash
when a device sent a lot of MIDI at once or had a large state.
Plugins and server have to be updated together for this, older
plugins are not loaded by the new server.

88emuPlayer:

[New] Added comprehensive README, shipped with the binaries.
[New] Added 88EmuCli for rendering MIDI files offline.
[New] Added standalone cli params for scripting and advanced options.
[Imp] Performance: Removed the additional emulation-worker buffering from
playback and live MIDI for performance. The player now renders the board
synchronously.
[New] Devices: Added support for the original SC-55, SC-155, SC-155mkII,
SCC-1A and SCB-55.
[New] Devices: Added the XPGS / G-800 sound engine.
[New] Devices: Added VE-GS Pro as a separate device.
[New] Devices: Added experimental SC-8820 emulation.
[New] Devices: Added experimental CM-32P emulation.
[New] Devices: Added emulated power on/off button using the Q shortcut.
[New] Devices: Added “Factory Reset on load” and “Fast Boot (skip intro)”
settings.
[Fix] Devices: Firmware that ran past the end of a 64 KB code page crashed the
player, for example a program ROM booted with the wrong MCU ROM. The
program counter now wraps to the start of the same page, as on the real
CPU.
[New] MIDI Player: Added Recomposer RCP/R36 (V2) and G36 (V3) playback support
(thanks to masanaohayashi and shingo45endo).
[New] MIDI Player: Added a configurable GM/GS/MT32 reset before each song.
[New] MIDI Player: Added a configurable pause between automatically advancing
songs.
[Fix] MIDI Player: Starting another song now clears channel controllers and
pitch bend, including when the per-song reset is Off, preventing the
previous song's pitch bend from leaving instruments out of tune.
Transport changes also invalidate file events still waiting in the
player/engine queues.
[Fix] MIDI Player: MIDI files with non-ASCII filenames can be opened through
the Unicode-aware filesystem path, including on Windows.
[New] Audio: Added selectable left and right hardware output channels,
remembered separately for each audio backend and device.
[New] Audio: Added “Use system device” for CoreAudio and Windows Audio
(WASAPI), enabled by default for configurations without an explicit
output choice.
[New] Audio: Added an optional stereo-linked output limiter after the volume
control, protecting playback and WAV recording when gain is increased.
[New] Audio: Added optional analog output emulation, including DAC word
precision and modeled output filtering. Select Off, Auto for the current
device, or a specific circuit: CM-32P, SC-55, SC-55mkII, SCC-1, G-800,
SC-88, SC-88VL, SC-88Pro, SC-8820 or SC-8850. Off remains the default.
[New] MIDI: Each MIDI input can now play one or more independently selected
part groups A–D, with assignments saved in MIDI settings. Available
groups depend on the selected device.
[Imp] MIDI: Expanded virtual MIDI inputs and outputs from A/B to A–D on
supported platforms, exposing all four SC-8850 groups. Device output
retains its original group, and launch options can customize the
port-name prefix.
[Fix] MIDI: Implemented the SC-88/SC-88Pro firmware's MIDI output path,
allowing messages such as front-panel bulk dumps to reach the selected
MIDI output.
[Fix] MIDI: Forwarded the Yamaha SysEx messages needed to activate the
SC-88Pro firmware's XG compatibility mode. This exposes the firmware's
existing compatibility behavior; it does not add full Yamaha XG
emulation.
[Fix] MIDI: Paced SC-55mkII MIDI bursts to avoid overflowing the emulated
controller's input buffer when many events arrive together.
[New] ROMs: Added custom ROM loading by conventional filename and exact size,
taking precedence over hash-based discovery. Known images still work
under arbitrary filenames. Unrecognized or modified content produces a
warning, with an option to suppress custom-ROM warnings.
[New] ROMs: Unavailable devices in the device menu now open a ROM requirements
dialog showing accepted filenames, sizes, hashes, missing components and
compatible alternatives. The details can be copied, and the ROM folder
can be opened directly.
[Imp] ROMs: SC-8850 wave ROMs can now be supplied as two distinct 16 MiB
banks, including recognized raw XP dump layouts, in addition to the
existing combined decoded image.
[Imp] ROMs: Recognized the SC-55mkII GS-28 2.00 image pre-patched with
shingo45endo's capital-tone-fallback patcher using its default SC-55
tone and v1 drum options. The player loads the patched image; it does
not apply the patch itself.
[Imp] ROMs: Limited automatic ROM searches to the player's data folder and its
subfolders, avoiding unrelated legacy/product locations. --rom-dir
selects an exclusive alternative folder. ROMs previously found only in
older search locations must be moved or selected through this option.
[Imp] ROMs: Optimized wave-ROM descrambling and compatible Pro-wave conversion
during loading (thanks to hackyourlife).
[Imp] UI: Reorganized the device menu to keep related models together.
[Imp] UI: Device and context menus now open in separate scrolling popup
windows, avoiding clipping at the edge of the player.
[Imp] UI: Added system-font fallbacks for names containing characters absent
from the bundled font, including CJK text, and normalized decomposed
macOS filenames for display.
[Fix] UI: The SC-8850 SHIFT, DEC and INC keyboard shortcuts now reach the
corresponding panel controls, including shifted minus/plus keys.
[Fix] UI: Mouse-wheel input on endless knobs now wraps instead of stopping at
the ends of the range, including the SC-8850 value encoder.
[Fix] UI: Clicking an open drop-down's control to dismiss its popup no longer
immediately reopens it.
[Fix] UI: On macOS, opening a temporary popup no longer hides the close button
of windows without minimize/maximize controls.

Vavra:

[Fix] Saving a sound limited some FX2 values to 29: the Speed of Chorus,
Flanger, Phaser and Five FX, the Size of Reverb and the Delay time of
the 5.1 Delay.

2.2.20:

Framework:

[Fix] Switching the part through the MCP server left Vavra, Xenia, Osirus
and OsTIrus showing the old part: the part selection did not move and
the patch manager kept targeting the previous part.
[Fix] The FX versions of OsTIrus, Vavra and Xenia did not show their device
specific settings, such as the voice expansion option of Vavra and Xenia.
[Fix] The DSP Bridge server ignored the plugins folder set in its
configuration and only loaded plugins from the folder next to its
executable.
[Fix] The DSP Bridge server still started a device from a ROM that was
damaged while being sent to it.
[Imp] BUG-10327 The DSP Bridge server can now run a device from a regular
plugin, not only from the server plugins that come with it. The
plugin has to be the same version as the one in the DAW, and goes
into the server's plugins folder.
[Imp] If the DSP Bridge server cannot create the device, the plugin now says
why, for example that the server has no plugin of that version,
instead of showing "Error code 4".
[Fix] BUG-10269 Dragging any edge of the plugin window other than a corner
made the interface smaller and never larger again. The fixed aspect
ratio was resolved from the proposed size alone, which always corrects
the larger of the two dimensions - exactly the one an edge drag
changes.
[Fix] VST2 builds that use the fst fallback, which steps in when the
Steinberg SDK is not present, corrupted the heap the first time the
host asked for the speaker arrangement. Every channel count was
affected, a mono bus included, and it could take down the plugin or
the host.
[Fix] Clock, start/stop, program change and channel pressure coming from the
host carried whatever bytes happened to follow them in memory: three
bytes were read from every message, however short it is.
[Fix] SysEx that reaches the plugin in pieces was handed to the emulation
twice, once reassembled and once as the raw fragments, which a
firmware can read as channel data.
[Fix] SysEx from a host that frames it twice lost its start byte instead of
the surplus end byte, leaving a headless message behind.
[Fix] BUG-10332 BUG-10337 The software renderer drew garbage and could crash
the plugin with a skin that tiles an image across an area: it read
past the end of the image instead of repeating it.
[Fix] The DSP Bridge server kept a device that could not be initialized,
for example because its firmware did not finish booting, and the
connection to it hung. The plugin now shows why the device could not
be created.
[Fix] On macOS, the packages of the standalone effect plugins never
contained the script that removes the quarantine flag.

Vavra/Xenia:

[Fix] The patch manager saw every patch as a duplicate of every other one,
because Vavra and Xenia never computed the fingerprint it compares:
"Hide duplicates (by hash)" left a single patch, and finding a patch by
its content matched all of them. Tags, favourites and renames saved
before are kept. Once they are saved again by this version, older
versions no longer show them.

Vavra:

[Fix] The FM source lists of the oscillators and filters had no entries for
the external input, so every choice after Noise landed three places
further down: LFO 1 selected the left external input, Filter Env
selected LFO 1, and the amp envelope, envelope 3 and envelope 4 could
not be reached at all. Existing sounds are unaffected, they now show
the source they actually use.

Xenia:

[Fix] The dialog shown in demo mode was titled Vavra.

2.2.19:

Framework:

[Fix] Closing a window while one of its drop-down or context menus was
still open could crash. The menu removed itself from a document that
was already tearing down, where every child has been detached from
its parent before any of them is destroyed.
[Fix] On macOS, the Metal renderer read the window and view geometry from
its own render thread. AppKit is not thread-safe, and doing so while
the message thread rearranges windows - reloading a skin, closing a
settings window - can corrupt state that only fails much later, in an
unrelated redraw. The geometry is now taken on the message thread.
[Fix] On macOS, the interface could freeze or stutter while its window was
hidden or covered by another one: the Metal render thread waited for
a drawable while holding the UI lock, up to a second at a time, and
the message thread starved waiting for it. And once that wait timed
out, the frame was dropped without telling the update loop, which
then waited for it forever - the window never updated again.
[Fix] On Windows and Linux, the OpenGL thread could draw the interface
while the message thread was changing it, without any lock between
them. The redraw juce requests on a resize took that path.
[Fix] With software rendering forced on Windows and Linux, the interface
was drawn from the top left corner of the window rather than at the
editor's position, so in a standalone it covered the title bar and
lost its bottom rows.
[Fix] After falling back from a software OpenGL rasterizer to the built-in
software renderer, the interface stopped updating.
[Fix] The DSP Bridge could crash or freeze the plugin, most often while a
project was being saved or when the connection to the server stalled.
[Fix] Picking a skin or a renderer from a menu could crash: choosing it closes
the window the menu itself lives in, and the menu kept working with what
was already gone.
[Fix] After the renderer changed, anything drawn from a cached snapshot - a box
shadow, for example - stayed invisible for the rest of the session.
[Fix] Keys held down while the window lost focus stayed down on Linux, and a
key that auto-repeated was reported as released once per repeat.
[Fix] The plugin told the host its latency from the audio thread, once per
block. Hosts answer that by suspending and re-preparing the plugin, so
playback could be interrupted at any moment.
[Fix] The interface could stall for as long as a frame took to draw, with
mouse and keyboard input queuing up behind it, and a redraw that called
back into the renderer could lock up completely.

88emuPlayer:

[Fix] Selecting ASIO now waits for an explicit output-device choice,
avoiding crashes from automatically loading an unsuitable driver.
Opening the driver's control panel no longer uses a deleted device.
[Fix] With software rendering forced, the interface was drawn into the top
left corner of the window on Windows displays running at a scaling
other than 100%, and mouse positions were off by the same factor. The
software renderer sized its output in logical pixels while the image
it draws into is sized in physical ones.
[Fix] On the SC-8850, the front panel could stop responding after a while
of playing a song: PART < and PART > did nothing, or a single press
switched ALL mode on and off. The emulated CPU delivered an interrupt
the firmware had just requested up to one audio sample late, and in
that gap the firmware's own task scheduler lost the task that times
the panel keys. Interrupts now arrive right after the instruction
that requested them.
[Fix] Panel switches are released when the window loses focus, so a stuck
switch can no longer turn every later press into a key combination.
[Fix] On the SC-88 and SC-88Pro, Display Letter and Display Dot Data
messages were ignored: the emulated sub-MCU only passed SysEx with
the GS model ID through to the main CPU, and the display messages
use model ID 45H. Songs that draw on the level-meter dots now do.
[Fix] On the SC-55mkII, a dense SysEx stream such as a display dot
animation produced "Check Sum Error" and "DT1 Data Error" every few
seconds. The emulated sub-MCU could hand the main CPU the same byte
twice when its periodic wake-up fell between the CPU reading the
status and reading the data.
[Fix] On the SC-88 and SC-88VL, a song that follows its GS Reset with a
burst of parameter SysEx without the pause the GS spec asks for could
lock the module up: no sound, no panel. The emulated MIDI wire
delivered such messages about a fifth faster than a real cable can,
which drained the firmware's transfer buffers while it was still
busy with the reset. SysEx is now paced by its full wire length.
[Fix] Stopping or pausing a song left notes hanging on the SC-8850's part
groups C and D, and so did removing the song that was playing. Panic
and the GM/GS reset buttons reached only groups A and B as well. The
player silenced two MIDI ports where a song can address four.
[Fix] The player no longer sends MIDI clock to the emulated module.
[Fix] On Linux the data and ROM folder was $HOME/Documents/The Usual
Suspects instead of the XDG location the other plugins use. It is now
$XDG_DATA_HOME (or $HOME/.local/share); the old folder is still read
so an existing installation keeps finding its ROMs.
[Fix] The MIDI settings no longer offer "Enable Virtual Port" on Windows.
PortMidi can only create virtual endpoints on macOS and Linux, so the
switch never did anything and left a polling thread running.
[Fix] Added missing ASIO support.
[Imp] "Force software rendering" now takes effect in the settings window as
well, not only in the panel. Until now the settings kept drawing with
the old renderer until they were closed and reopened.
[Imp] The drop-down lists in the audio and MIDI settings open in a window of
their own. They are no longer cut off at the edge of the settings
dialog, and a long list such as the buffer sizes scrolls instead of
spreading into columns across the whole page.
[Imp] MIDI settings: the list of MIDI inputs is three times as tall, with one
compact line per device, and the note about virtual MIDI ports on
Windows sits below the list instead of crowding the output selector.
[Fix] Fixed midi receive in the high level sub mcu emulation with midi files
that send custom LCD messages.
[Imp] ROM images are now identified by their size and content instead of by
filename, and subfolders of a ROM search path are searched too. Dumps
can be renamed or kept in an unsorted collection, either byte order of
a mask ROM is accepted, and a truncated or unrelated file of the right
size can no longer be mistaken for a ROM.
[Imp] A device can only be selected once every ROM it needs is present.
Incomplete ones are greyed out instead of failing when picked, the
first complete device is used when the configured one is unavailable,
and the missing-ROM notice names each image with its size and hash.
[Imp] Added icon for the app.

2.2.18:

88emuPlayer:

[New] First internal release.

2.2.17:

Framework:

[Fix] BUG-10308 Skins: an animation did nothing at all when its keyframes
name contained an uppercase letter, because the name was folded to
lower case before it was looked up. Keyframe names are now case
sensitive, the same as in CSS.
[New] BUG-10200 Skins can react to notes being played. A skin script can
now register for note on and note off and draw a keyboard, a velocity
meter or an activity indicator, which was impossible before because
notes go straight to the emulated hardware and never reach the
parameter API. Notes are reported whatever their source and before
MIDI Learn can consume them, and a note on with velocity 0 is
reported as the note off it means. See doc/lua_scripting.md.
[New] BUG-10302 Skins can store their own variables. A skin can now keep
state the synth knows nothing about, such as which of its knobs it
has linked together, in one of two scopes: per instance, saved and
restored with the host project, or global, shared by every instance
through the plugin config. Reading without naming a scope answers
from the instance and falls back to the global, so a skin can ship a
default and let a project override it. Values are numbers or strings
and a callback reports changes. See doc/lua_scripting.md.
[Imp] BUG-10273 BUG-10277 Mame HQ is now the default resampler mode, and
the mode is remembered. A mode stored in a project is still used for
that project; when a project does not carry one, the mode last
selected on the settings page applies, and Mame HQ if it was never
changed. Note that projects saved before this version did not store
the mode at all while it was set to Legacy, so those open in Mame HQ
now and need the mode set once if Legacy is wanted.
[Fix] BUG-10313 Preset files of other plugins failed to import when they
happened to contain an $f0 and an $f7 byte with arbitrary data in
between. Such a pair is not a sysex message, but it was read as one,
after which the importer considered the file parsed and never tried
the format the file actually is.

Osirus:

[Fix] Virus A OS 2.52 could not be used at all. The ROM was rejected while
loading, because that OS carries one firmware chunk less than every
later one, and it also derailed the emulated DSP while booting, over
a loop construct that OS 2.80 no longer uses, leaving it silent.
Both the .mid update files and a flash dump of that OS now work.
[Fix] Presets imported from the TDM plugin lost their name if the file was
not named after its position in a factory bank. "A29 Darkroom3" is
imported as "Darkroom3" as before, but "Autobend BC" was imported as
"BC" and is now kept as it is.

OsTIrus:

[New] BUG-10237 TrancyTI skin: a Multi page. The eleventh tab opens a
column per part with its volume, pan, transpose and detune, its low
and high key, MIDI channel, output and note steal priority, and its
enable switch, so the parts of a multi can be set up in one place
instead of one part at a time. The MIDI channel dropdown now reads
1 to 16 rather than 0 to 15. Making room for the tab made all eleven
of them a little narrower.
[Fix] BUG-10238 TrancyTI skin: the + and - markings around the SLOPE knob
of the filter, envelope 3, envelope 4 and amplifier envelopes were
the wrong way round. The panel had + on the left and - on the right,
while turning the knob to the right raises the value, as every other
skin shows it.

Vavra:

[Fix] BUG-10184 Loading a Multi, Drum map or Arrangement asked the device to
send the dump straight back, which is how the editor stays in sync when
a single patch is loaded. With a whole arrangement going out at once the
device answers such a request with what it held when the request was
made, so late answers overwrote dumps that had only just been sent: the
first Multi loaded after opening the plugin did nothing at all, and an
arrangement lost a varying handful of its sixteen parts. Everything is
now read back once, after the last dump is out.
[Fix] BUG-10184 Drum maps are listed under the name they carry instead of all
being called "Drum Map", and a renamed one is saved and exported under
its new name.
[Fix] A Drum map that was loaded is now part of the state the host saves, so
it returns with the project instead of being lost.
[New] BUG-10184 Patch Manager now supports Multi, Arrangement and
Drum dumps alongside Singles. They are detected automatically
on file import and tagged via the new "Type" category. Loading
an Arrangement (Multi + 16 Singles) switches to Multi mode,
applies the Multi and distributes the 16 Singles into the
parts. Arrangements can be saved to user banks via the Save
menu. Dropping a Multi or Arrangement onto a Part Button
prompts for confirmation since it replaces more than one part.

Xenia:

[Fix] BUG-10184 Loading a Multi or Arrangement asked the device to send the
dump straight back, and those answers arrived late enough to overwrite
what had just been sent, so the first Multi loaded after opening the
plugin did nothing. Everything is now read back once, after the last
dump is out, and the Singles of all parts are refreshed afterwards the
way Vavra already did it.
[New] BUG-10184 Patch Manager now supports Multi and Arrangement
dumps alongside Singles. They are detected automatically on
file import and tagged via the new "Type" category. Loading an
Arrangement (Multi + 8 Singles) switches to Multi mode, applies
the Multi and distributes the 8 Singles into the parts.
Arrangements can be saved to user banks via the Save menu.
Dropping a Multi or Arrangement onto a Part Button prompts for
confirmation since it replaces more than one part.