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by ofalkaed·7mo ago·view on hn ↗
Is it possible (practical) to reverse engineer a synth that uses a custom and undocumented DSP? The Alesis Micron is probably my favorite synth and I have always wanted it in a little laptop groovebox type of package, considered just repackaging mine but the main PCB is not very suited to what I would want. I also tried to just redesign it from the ground up but it has some tricks for avoiding aliasing and are a major part of its overall sound which I can not figure out.

Assuming this is possible, any resources for learning how to go about it? What little I have found has relied heavily on the DSP being well documented.

Apologies if OP video goes into this, internet is not cooperating right now and steaming is not going to happen. Looking forward to watching it, never pass on anything that might offer even a tiny glimpse into reverse engineering the Micron.

2 comments
> Is it possible (practical) to reverse engineer a synth that uses a custom and undocumented DSP?

Yes, that's what the talk is about. It's probably an interesting watch to you since they actually went through a couple of different approaches to end up with a working emulation.

The video covers their approach for reverse engineering the Motorola DSP56300, but it's probably fair to say it was decidedly non-trivial!
The video covers their DSP56300 work briefly in the introduction, but the main topic is that of reverse engineering the undocumented Toshiba DSP used in Roland JP-8000.