When SoundFont technology matured (thanks to Creative Labs’ Sound Blaster AWE and Live! cards), users did what they always do: they ripped the ROMs. The "Proteus Soundfont" is a labor of love (and legal gray area) performed by audio archivists. They painstakingly sampled every note of the original Proteus hardware, mapped the velocity layers, and compiled them into .sf2 files.
Suddenly, a producer with a $100 laptop in 2004 could access the same sonic palette that Trent Reznor used on The Downward Spiral or that Dr. Dre used on The Chronic . proteus soundfont
In the golden era of the 1990s, if you walked into a professional recording studio or a hobbyist’s bedroom MIDI rig, you would likely find two things: a copy of Cakewalk or Cubase , and a silver, 1U rack-mounted box known as the E-mu Proteus 1 . They painstakingly sampled every note of the original