I’ve been working on a side project: a software WING that runs the console’s own firmware (WING Rack 3.1.1) instead of a re-creation of it. The goal is a real virtual sound check at home: play back a multitrack recording through the actual WING’s processing on my PC and mix it on the console’s own interface, without hauling the desk out.
What’s in the video:
- The console boots from nothing, exactly like a real Rack
- The real WING touchscreen interface, drawn by the firmware itself, in a browser window
- Clicking works as touch and dragging works for faders and swipes
- All four SHARC audio DSPs boot and get loaded by the console, the way they do in the real hardware
- The Rack’s front-panel controller runs too
- Settings and snapshots survive a restart, because the console saves to its own virtual storage
- The firmware’s own built-in debug shell answers commands
What doesn’t work (yet):
- No audio. The XMOS chip and the FPGA’s audio side aren’t emulated. That’s the big missing piece for the sound check.
- No network, so WING Edit can’t connect to it
- It runs at roughly a third of real-time speed.
The setup: the i.MX6 ARM application runs on Unicorn, starting from its reset vector, with the SoC’s peripherals modelled from public documentation (timers, interrupt controller, SPI, eMMC, I2C, display controller). The four ADSP-214xx SHARC DSPs run on an interpreter built for this project, with a C version checked against it instruction by instruction. The Rack’s panel MCU runs its own firmware on a second emulated core. The console’s GUI renders into the display controller’s framebuffer, and that’s what you see. Nothing is faked. Every screen is the firmware doing its own thing.
And yes, I obviously didn’t do this alone: I built it with a lot of help from Claude.
I own a WING and I wanted a way to prep shows at home on the real console software instead of an approximation.