Audio Damage AD-202 turns the MC-202 into an 8-voice polyphonic synth

Audio Damage has released the AD-202, a software emulation of Roland’s 1983 MC-202, the synth/sequencer hybrid that borrowed circuitry ideas from the SH-101 and TB-303 without ever matching either one’s reputation. It runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows, plus iOS, and there’s a free version playable in the browser.

The notable departure from the hardware: the original MC-202 was monophonic, and the AD-202 isn’t. It’s 8-voice polyphonic, built around a single VCO with four ranges (a PolyBLEP sawtooth and a DC-free two-saw pulse), with a sub-oscillator and noise generator in the mixer stage. That mixer also doubles as a saturation stage, with a Pre-Filter Sat control that Audio Damage says can drive up to eight times harder into the clipper with no makeup gain, meaning it behaves like running all four sources wide open at once.

Filtering is a 24dB four-pole resonant ladder with its own drive control and a tanh nonlinearity in the feedback path, plus gain compensation at high resonance so things don’t collapse when you push it. There’s one ADSR, a syncable multi-wave LFO with delay, portamento up to five seconds, an “age” parameter for per-voice random drift, post-VCA distortion, a bipolar tilt EQ, and full MPE with per-note pitch bend.

Worth trying if you want a bassline-and-lead mono synth architecture that can also stack chords, which the real MC-202 never could. The catch is Audio Damage hasn’t published pricing on the page scraped here, so check their store before assuming what tier you’re buying into.