I spent a majority of my life during that time doing everything I could to update it on a regular basis and burnt out. Sometimes you just have to let it go.
Is there anything that could in theory happen to allow the firmware to be open source, so to allow the community to continue with it? I figure in some time period, people will figure out many aspects (as they've done with the Machinedrum, and now have community driven firmwares).
(I have a Tempest, and I'm decent software dev. Wouldn't mind helping maintain a project around it)
Sadly no, for a number of reasons not least of which is multiple CPUs and too much necessary documenting to do that and even if… I don’t think Focusrite would be too keen on it
I know the answer is "no, not that either" but I'm still going to ask: What about sharing the spec of the Tempest's sysex format? Sure would be nice to have the opportunity to build a patch editor/librarian - but my assumption is, if it was reasonably doable to share information that could enable that kind of thing, that choice would have been made by now.
I treat the Tempest as a standalone instrument that happens to output MIDI clock. Nothing's gotten in the way of it being my favorite instrument (at least, once free-running LFOs were added - absolute game changer for claps and snares), and if I had a magic wand, the only thing I'd change is to make the 'noise' samples have a random start offset on the waveform playback (something I used to do with Impulse Tracker), which I think would eliminate the phasing that sometimes happens when two voices use the same noise sample. Maybe next time...
I definitely have given out the sysex info to people. Post on the forum and see if someone has it accessible, if not I’ll look through my emails to find it when I have a moment
