When sound designing, I like the minimalist approach of VSTHost or Cantabile to host my synth with Melda’s MOscilloscope/MAnalyzer but I needed something to capture my own single cycles.
After some fairly unproductive googling around, I came across TX16Wx and was a bit surprised at how deep the sampler is with so little discussion. I had not even realised the TX16W was an early 1990’s Yamaha hardware sampler based on the Motorola 68000.
Fortunately, the TX16Wx has a sensible modernish UX which appears loosely based on the functionality of the TX16W. Looks like you can go to town building a fully featured layered, multisound synth instruments in the VST. Well beyond what I was after for one shots and single cycle samples.
As I spiralled down this rabbit hole. Found a thread on gearspace that lead me to Cyclone, a TX16W emulation in all its 2 line LCD menu diving disk swapping glory!
Cyclone was released free in 2013 and still updated as of 25 Nov 2022, running 64bit win VST2/VST3. People have has some success running the VST on MacOS and wrapping it to run on Linux.
The Cyclone VST is running Typhoon 2000 the fixed up OS compared to the original TX16W OS from Yamaha. You can find the Typhoon 2000 and original TX16W manuals online. Make sure you save the state to a fxb file to help preserve the state (and some of your sanity). The disk img files are not modern mountable img files but can be open using archive files like 7-Zip. There is a script to covert the TX16W img files/samples to WAV. There are plenty of samples on the SonicCharge Forum but this one is useful as it contains a blank disk img! You can even record your own samples at 33kHz 7800ms long if you route audio to the VST.
[edit] The Yamaha SY 99 also supports loading TX16W samples into the AWM2 rompler engine.