It’s been pretty busy here lately at Fort Rebel, but not too busy to make the occasional patch!
There’s this cool VST plugin which uses a chip-level emulation of the YM2413:
http://www.keijiro.tokyo/vst2413/
The YM2413, aka OPLL, was a basic FM synth chip used in some cheaper keyboards and the Yamaha SHS-10 keytar.
The VST was written by Keijiro Takahashi, and the chip emulation by Mitsutaka Okazaki.
We took some code from both to create an OWL patch:
Try clicking on PLAY, then SHOW KEYBOARD to try this out in a modern browser.
There’s another version which lets you edit some of the synth parameters:
This implements a basic 9-voice FM synth, with 6 voices polyphony (two operators per voice) and 3 voices dedicated to some pretty 8-bit sounding percussion sounds, triggered by the buttons.
(Note that we haven’t quite got all the buttons working in the browser yet, sorry!)
More (much more!) detailed information about the chip can be found here:
http://www.smspower.org/maxim/Documents/YM2413ApplicationManual