XVA1 Beta 1

Hopefully, you all are safe and doing well, now that everything is strange., and it seems it will be that way for quite a while.

We’ve been in what the mass media calls “the longest lockdown in the world”, soon to be 90 days in my country (Argentina). Those long periods can feel like lost time, but I didn’t let that happen to me. Besides doing a hell of work in my daily job to allow thousands of people to return to a safe workplace, I managed to spend some time doing MCU and FPGA development.

XVA1 is one of those developments. It’s a 32-voice Virtual-Analog Synthesizer, which runs in the same platform as XFM2.

Yes, this means that it will run in your XFM2 build without any hardware changes, only firmware. As in XFM2, this is not “embedded software”. XVA1 is a fully hardware gizmo, made up of bare metal, at gate level.

The synthesizer has 32 voices, with four oscillators per voice, stereo mixing bus and a 2-pole or 4-pole LPF/HPF stereo filter per voice, three EG, and two LFO, plus a myriad of modulation options.

The synthesizer features the same effects engine as in XFM2, plus a new Distortion effect. It also uses the same arpeggiator, microtuning engine, etc.

The project is already feature-complete and fully functional and sounds great. The oscillators are calculated at a sample rate measured in megahertz, and then downsampled and processed through the filters, effects, and sent to the DAC at 96kHz.

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be creating a few demos, and documentation. However, if you want to peek at it, get it from here.

Having XVA1 running is just loading the bitstream image (either using adept or the flash loader), then XLoad’ing the factory bank. XVA1 will use the same tuning definition files as XFM2, so no need to load them again.

Make sure you backup any XFM2 program you’ve made before uploading XVA1 factory bank.

Please report back any findings in your explorations, so I can fix it. Enjoy!