social.noyu.me

look. you'd do it for her, right?

(not my photo and also i edited it to to fix messed up colours)

‪i saw one of these in a shop in berlin a few months ago and instantly knew i wanted one. it has the classic design and form-factor of the sc-55, but the power of the sc-88, and it just looks so pretty in white. but they wanted too much for it. today i finally got lucky‬

‪it's messed up how things take time to ship‬

she arrived and she's beautiful 🧡🤍😭

even this photo doesn't really do it justice, in cooler lighting the saturation of the orange is much more obvious and also the buttons to the immediate right of the screen light up in a wonderful coral colour. also, the way the display visualises notes is a thing of beauty

another photo, this one comes a bit closer

‪ngl i did have to check i wasn't dreaming when one of these popped up on Kleinanzeigen for €99‬

finally i can listen to this banger [SC-88 demo song TOXOPLASMA, clearly the theme of cat enthusiasts] on my own hardware!!! 🧡 https://twitter.com/OnlyMIDIs/status/1597643441089155074

do you think she'll get jealous

“hey hikari where can i learn more about this sound module you bought”

thank you for asking, imaginary interlocutor! at https://dtm.noyu.me/wiki/Roland_SC-88

“hey i've never heard of that wiki”

you wouldn't have! i only started it quite recently

there might be some other wikis out there for some of these devices but we (it's not just my project) are coming at it from more of a musician's perspective, not a DOS gamer™'s perspective, which means we'll probably cover them quite differently. also we know our shit

@hikari I have an 55MkII variant here (SC-55K) because 88's cost too much and most 88 music ALMOST sounds right on a 55MkII.
Also an MT-32, which i could not afford if i were to try to get one today

@wyatt8740 thankfully i hear MUNT is pretty good? also there's Roland's SCVA plugin which stops being sold tomorrow

@wyatt8740 but having real hardware is great, i totally get it, i own too much haha

yeah, there's a real “DOS gamer tax” :/

@hikari yeah MUNT is in a lot of ways "better" than an MT-32 if you are making music because it doesn't cut notes off as easily and you can increase the maximum number of active partials.
Wasn't aware of SCVA much

@wyatt8740 there's also Nuked SC-55 now, which is really cool

@wyatt8740 since you have a 55K you might be interested in Octavia. not an emulator but it replaces the screen

@hikari link??
because i see two or three things named octavia and none of them look at a glance to be a replacement LCD for an SC-55K

@hikari if it's this, it's typescript and i will likely never want to run it.
Especially because it's highly unlikely to work on most of my old hardware whatsoever
https://github.com/ltgcgo/octavia

@hikari (for instance, the V8 javascript runtime does not even work on 32-bit powerpc, and modern firefox needs - guess what - nodeJS in order to build.)
So yeah, not ideal
Edit: as for webkitgtk, it works but it falls back on full-software rendering which is awful on a 1.33GHz G4
If it had been written in something that wasn't "modern web" based it'd be cool

@wyatt8740 ah, i see. yeah retrocomputing has drawbacks for software compatibility

@hikari

@hikari it is indeed very pretty

@hikari That looks like it’d fit in a 5.25” drive bay?

@h0m54r it's a half-rack module, i think those are ~22cm wide, whereas the classic pc drive bay is ~14cm wide?

@h0m54r i have a roland sc-7 already also, that thing is unusually small, but it also wouldn't fit in a pc drive bay. horizontally anyway (it's about 17cm wide, but its height is a few mm less than a cd drive)

@hikari Darn—it has a similar aesthetic to things like the Creative Audigy.

(I used to think that blanked out drive bays were wasted space and would be much better filled with things like that, even if I didn’t need their functionality. Same reason I used Microsoft Word with every single toolbar enabled, which in turn is probably partially why Microsoft introduced the ribbon UI)

@h0m54r i think i had a computer that came preinstalled with a 5.25 to 3.5 adapter in one bay, and then a multi-format memory card reader inside that

@h0m54r oh, the smallest Sound Canvas was a PCMCIA card, the SCP-55 (funny name…). i wonder if any PCs had a PCMCIA slot in a floppy drive bay…