Akai S2000 Rosetta OS: the Akai S2000 mod (custom firmware + effects without the EB16)

A free mod for the Akai S2000 (S-2000) sampler: reverb, echo and reverse delay with no EB16 effects board. Boots from a Gotek, tested on real hardware. Work in progress: see Status. Landing page: yuyoi.github.io/Akai-S2000-Rosetta-OS.

New tricks for the Akai S2000 sampler. Rosetta OS is a patch kit for the stock OS 2.0: you build a boot floppy image from your own S2000 OS disk and boot it from a Gotek (FlashFloppy). It unlocks the voice chip's hidden delay engine as effects with their own EFFECTS page (no EB16 effects board needed), puts the live input through them, including a live reverse delay set to your BPM, with its own menu, adds an MPC-style home screen and menus, one-button sampling, and a synth layer (analog drift, detune, filter LFO on MIDI CCs). It also gives the S2000 64 KB of room for new code, loaded from the boot floppy after boot, so there's space to build much more. Nothing touches ROM or flash: boot your stock disk and it's an S2000 again.

Made by JunkSmithWizard (JSW) together with Claude (Anthropic's AI). Claude wrote the code and did the reverse engineering: NEC V53 disassembly, a whole-OS emulator, and the hidden delay engine measured over MIDI. JSW ran every build on a real S2000, built the measurement rig, and made the calls by ear. Same family as the GP-16 Rosetta OS, which the boot dragon comes from. Questions, hardware reports and ideas: Discord.

Demo

Listen: rosetta_fx_demo.mp3 (0:58, recorded from a real S2000 running Rosetta 0.10)

⚠ AUDIO WARNING: turn your volume down first. The test sounds are harsh: noise bursts and a 1 kHz beep.

• 0:00: noise burst, 3 hits per effect (~5 s each): OFF, ROOM, HALL, PLATE, ECHO, PINGPONG, CHORUS, FLANGER.
• 0:42: 1 kHz beep: OFF, CHORUS, FLANGER.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗