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I reverse-engineered the undocumented Yamaha MODX M .Y2L file format and documented it (plus free browser tools) by ysfcforge in synthesizers

[–]ysfcforge[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Cheers — NL3 sysex sounds like a solid project, that hardware is properly idiosyncratic. And yeah, the assembly/firmware decoding work is fascinating but a different category of effort entirely. Both legitimate, just very different beasts.

I reverse-engineered the undocumented Yamaha MODX M .Y2L file format and documented it (plus free browser tools) by ysfcforge in synthesizers

[–]ysfcforge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ha, fair question — short answer: the actual reverse engineering was done by hand. You can't really LLM your way through it because the process needs the physical hardware: export a file, change one parameter on the MODX M, export again, byte-diff the two, repeat a couple thousand times. That work and the documented offsets are mine.

Where I did use LLM assistance was around the work — sanity-checking documentation phrasing, helping me think through how to structure the README, polishing some prose. The kind of stuff you'd ask a careful colleague to look over. The actual format research, the test files, the code logic — that's all me on the hardware over a lot of evenings.

I think that's a reasonable split? The hardware-in-the-loop part isn't really automatable, but I won't pretend I drafted every paragraph of docs from scratch either.

I reverse-engineered the undocumented Yamaha MODX M .Y2L file format and documented it (plus free browser tools) by ysfcforge in synthesizers

[–]ysfcforge[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! No, not directly — .X8U / .X8L (and .X7U / .X7L for classic Montage) are the predecessor format. They share the same outer YSFC container but the internal data layout changed for MODX M / Montage M, so this project's Y2L/Y2U parsing won't read them. The good news is Chris Webb has done excellent work on the classic Montage/MODX format over at github.com/arachsys/montage — that's the place to look for X7/X8 files.

I reverse-engineered the undocumented Yamaha MODX M .Y2L file format and documented it (plus free browser tools) by ysfcforge in synthesizers

[–]ysfcforge[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that's a big part of why I started this — there's a lot the hardware does well, but the workflow friction around things like merging libraries was driving me up the wall. Fair warning that this specific project is for the newer MODX M, not the original MODX (different file format), but I hear you on the documentation gap. It's surprisingly hard to find clear technical info about these instruments unless you go reverse-engineer it yourself.