Vintage Emulator Studio (VES)

A JUCE-based AU/VST3 plug-in and standalone app that plays vintage synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and sound modules by running their original firmware inside an embedded, patched MAME. C++, AGPL-3.0-only for its own code, 69★ and 9 forks; the repository was created 2026-08-30 and last pushed 2026-09-06, at version 0.9.289 against a MAME 0.289 baseline. Built and sold by Autodafe in Milan; the repo carries the source, the binaries are a paid download.

This is the spoke's first source for the bottom rung of vintage-recreation — software emulation — and it does not do the thing that rung assumed.

What it actually is

Not a DSP model of an old instrument. VES compiles a reduced MAME subtarget (vesembedded) that boots a selected machine driver with no desktop UI, then bridges its audio, MIDI, video and input through memory into a plug-in. The instrument's own microprocessor is simulated and the instrument's own ROM code executes — firmware-emulation, as against the virtual-analog modelling the rest of this corner is built on. The plug-in window shows a captured video frame of the machine's front panel, and VES adds "virtual MIDI retrofit" paths so instruments that never had MIDI (the Prophet-5, the LinnDrum, the Oberheim DMX, the Yamaha PSR-11) can be played from a DAW.

The machine list, and what it tells you

Roughly 45 machines across nine makers: Akai samplers and MPCs (CD3000i/XL, MPC60, MPC3000, S2000, S3000/XL), Casio (CZ-101, CZ-1, CZ-230S, CT-8000, RZ-1), Ensoniq (ESQ-1, VFX, VFX-SD, SD-1), LinnDrum, Oberheim DMX, Roland TR-707 and TR-727, Sequential Prophet-5 and Six-Trak, and a long Yamaha tail (DX100, TX81Z, FB-01, TG100, MU-50, MU-2000, and a dozen PSR/PSS home keyboards).

The list is almost entirely digital-architecture instruments — FM, phase distortion, PCM, sample replay, digital drum machines. That is not a curatorial preference; it is the reach of the technique. Emulating a CPU and its sound chips reproduces an instrument whose sound is computation. The Prophet-5 and the Six-Trak are the outliers, analog voice circuits under digital control, and neither the repository nor MAME's own driver status says how much of those voice paths is modelled. VES is explicit that "machine availability, accuracy, and completeness depend on the current state of the corresponding MAME drivers" and that some machines may be incomplete.

The licensing is the engineering

Five licences are mapped, per component, in LICENSING.md: VES's own source AGPL-3.0-only, the vendored MAME tree GPL-2.0-or-later with per-file licences retained, VES's MAME integration files BSD-3-Clause where marked, SDL3 Zlib, the Inter font OFL-1.1, bundled artwork CC0-1.0. JUCE 8 is dual AGPLv3-or-commercial and is not vendored. The logo and product name are carved out of both the software grant and the CC0 dedication.

And the part that makes it run is not in the box. ROMs, firmware, NVRAM and machine media are excluded from source control on purpose: "Users and developers must obtain any required machine data themselves." So the free software is complete and legal, and the copyrighted firmware every one of these instruments needs to boot is the user's problem. The emulator is given away, the emulated is not given at all.

Reproducibility, which nothing else here offers

MAME is not forked and merged. It is vendored at tag mame0289, commit f34f02505e32c1993c6a782b6814232cbfc74e36, alongside an ordered patch series in patches/mame-0.289/ and a check-ves-mame-patches.sh script that verifies applying the series to a clean upstream checkout reproduces the vendored tree. docs/MAME_PATCHSET.md then lists what the patches do: the vesembedded target, the embedded runtime, the MIDI retrofits, experimental Akai S3000-family profiles, a floppy-media option-parsing fix, and preserved Windows/MSVC portability changes. Four build configurations are declared validated (macOS arm64 and x86_64, Windows x64, Linux x86_64) and no binaries are checked in.

That is a stronger provenance discipline than any other software source in this spoke. It is also first-party and unmeasured: nothing here compares VES's output to a real CZ-101, and the accuracy claim is inherited wholesale from MAME rather than tested by VES.

Tier

T1 as a first-party project repository — the maker's own documentation of the maker's own software, which is the strongest evidence available for what it is and how it is built. It is not evidence for how it sounds, and there is no review, measurement or listening test attached.

firmware-emulation · mame · autodafe · vintage-recreation · analog-vs-digital · sampler · synthesizer · audio-effect-plugin · akai · oberheim · daw · synthesis