This one is a bit special. Most free emulations recreate a synth from scratch, guessing at how it sounded. This one does not guess at all. The MS2000R Emulator runs the actual code from the real machine, so what you hear is the MS2000 itself, just living inside your computer.
The hardware here is the Korg MS2000R, the rack version of the early 2000s Korg MS2000 virtual analog synth, the same engine that later powered the microKORG. It is a hands on synth with a big sound: two oscillators with saw, pulse, cross modulation, ring mod and those classic DW-8000 waveforms, a resonant filter that can get gloriously rude, a vocoder, an arpeggiator, and the mod and motion sequencers that made the original so much fun to program. This emulator runs the original H8S/2350 main CPU firmware instruction by instruction, and the original DSP56362 code on the dsp56300 emulator library. Nothing of the synth engine is re-implemented. Programs, the vocoder, the arpeggiator, the mod and motion sequencer, the built in demo songs, MIDI in and out, and even program WRITE all work, with the flash memory emulated so your edits stick. There are 59 host automatable parameters in the plugin, each one mapped to a physical control on the front panel, which is reproduced in full.
Here is the video, all sounds from the emulator, no talking, just patches:
Download it free here:
https://github.com/Tuth/ms2000r-emu/releases
It is free and open source. Grab the latest release, currently v0.9.8, and download MS2000R-v0.9.8-win64.zip.
How to install:
Windows: Unzip the release file. You can run the standalone MS2000R emulator straight away, or copy the VST3 into your plugin folder and load it in your DAW. You will need a fairly recent CPU, since the emulation runs about 2x real time on a current desktop.
Mac: There is no prebuilt Mac download in the release, but you can build it from source, which gives you a VST3 and an AU plugin.
Linux: There is a headless build only, so this one is really a Windows and Mac pick for most people.
One important thing before it will boot. This emulator ships with no firmware and no ROM files at all, and that is by design. Before it will make a sound you need two files from your own hardware: flash.bin, a complete 1 MB dump of the firmware flash from your own MS2000 or MS2000R, and boot-362.bin, the DSP56362 boot ROM, 768 bytes, which is required and without which there is no sound at all. An LCD character generator ROM called hd44780_a00.bin is optional and it falls back to plain text if it is missing. The release zip includes the MS2000 Flash Tool for Windows, which reads the flash from your own unit over MIDI using the unit's update mode from Korg's v1.07 updater. Never use it with an MS2000B or MS2000BR.
To be clear in plain words: piracy is not endorsed here. You must own the device to use this emulator, and you must find, or dump from your own unit, the ROM files yourself. If you do not own an MS2000 or MS2000R, this one is not for you, but it is a beautiful thing for anyone who does own one and wants the real machine on their laptop.
If you have the hardware sitting in a corner, this is the closest thing to carrying it in your pocket. Go and give it a spin.