Ok, so after a long conversation we found out a lot of things. One of them: Kevin won't be able to do the full project. His Synthmaker version is too restrictive. I, on the other hand, don't have the expertise to do all the serious technical stuff, like proper filters, etc.
So I share what I found out so far, which should bring anyone, who is interested to do this ESQ1 recreation, a big step forward.
The structure of the ESQ1 is as follows.
The lowest layer are the
waveforms. Those are one cycle of a wave, some of them synthetically created, some of them sampled from real instruments.
The next layer (and the first one, a user has access to) are the
waves. The ESQ1 has 32
waves, but the definition is different to what you know as waves. A
wave here means a collection of above mentioned
waveforms (up to 6), with each
waveform assigned to a certain midi key range.
The highest layer are the programs. A program manages up to three oscillators -each one associated with one of the
waves-, the envelopes, the filter, etc.
It is advisable to build the ESQ1 recreation in this order as well. To get the original waveforms, you should download the ESQ1 WaveROMs #1 and #2 on this page:
http://www.buchty.net/ensoniq/ (Scroll down a lot)
There are also aiff files of the waveforms, but the guy who converted them created Aliases for those waveforms that are used by several waves. Such Aliases are not visible/usable when you unzip the package, and so it is missing a lot of waveforms.
The WaveROM#1 and #2 are .bin files, which is a self-extracting format used in Linux. I couldn't find a way to convert them yet. Should they be just packed and not compressed, in theory all the sound data should be extractable with a binary viewer. Or maybe some one around here has Linux and can convert them to a more friendly Windows-readable file?
The format of those is 8-bit, 1MHz/26=38,462kHz. Which means, you need an audio editor that can deal with such an unusual format.
Just remember that the ESQ1 uses a multi-sample (read "ROMpler") type of synthesis to feed the OSCs, not wavetables. If you head for the original sound, you have to re-do it (maybe use the multi-sampler module in Flowstone, or build your own, tailor-made multi-sampler for this project).
All details about the waveforms can be found in this manual pdf, page 35ff (page 38 starts a list of all the names of the waves -those, that users can select-).
http://www.synthmanuals.com/manuals/ensoniq/esq-1/musicians_manual/esq-1_musicians_manual.pdf