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Boban Spasic edited this page Mar 9, 2023 · 4 revisions

Welcome to the PSS Revive wiki

Here you'll find some info about Yamaha PSS x80 (480, 580, 680, 780).
I'll try to collect every interesting info I can, and publish it here.

Why PSS Revive?

The PSS-x80 keyboards are interesting because of the editable FM-synth engine. There are also 5 memory places to store your custom voices.
The more interesting thing is that there are even more editable parameters inside the box, not just the parameters settable over the buttons on your keyboard.

Let's take a look at the User Manual supplied with your PSS-x80 keyboard:

Yamaha_manual_VMEM
Here I see two interesting things:

  • much more parameters as on the keyboard itself
  • a bunch of suspicious X-es, described as "does not matter" from Yamaha

To edit the documented parameters, we have a plethora of programs available (I'll try to count them in the order of appearance):

  • PSSED (Blue Whale Software, Atari ST, 1989)
  • VOICEDIT (K.R. Thompson, Atari ST, 1990)
  • PSSDUMP (Graham Galbraith, Atari ST, 1991)
  • Psslib2 (Mike Silverstein, Atari ST, 1994)
  • PSSEdit (Boban Spasic, Windows 95/98/ME, 2002)
  • PSS_EDIT (Charles Copp, Atari ST, 2008)
  • PSS Wave Editor (Laurent Ma, Multi-platform, 2014)
  • PSS-680 (Tony "artaslove", Python/Linux, 2019)
  • PortaSoundJS (Matt Montag, web-based, 2021)
  • Panel for Ctrlr (Martin Tarenskeen, Multi-platform, 2022)

From all the programs above, just the PSSEdit (I am the author of this one too) did try to investigate the "does not matter" parameters. Unfortunately, just a couple of months after writing the PSSEdit, I moved to another country and couldn't take my PSS-780 with me, so there was no further development of the PSSEdit, nor some further investigation of the "does not matter" parameters. If you ask does it make any sense to investigate these parameters, I'll answer with a question - if these really does not matter, why every ROM voice from the PSS has some of these parameters set to some value other than zero?

Take a look here (SysEx dump of the ROM voice "Piano 1" from the Yamaha PSS-780):

VMEM_View_left

All the sky-blue marked bits are some of the "does not matter" bits, according to Yamaha.

More than 20 years latter, I decided to get back to this one more time. I've bought a PSS-480 and started coding a new program - the PSS Revive.

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