[sdiy] Camel*ont* soft Da synth!

[Rainer Buchty]

>Why? Really strange marketing claims, i mean who want to run the *old*
>internal 68000 ST midi handling on a Coldfire?

Maybe cause the Coldfire is essentially a 68k?

A strange claim for sure, cause I don't see any magic in
interrupt-triggered circular buffers, but maybe the Wintel-twisted mind
is not used to latencies below 20ms anymore, who knows.

>Secondly *one* 56xxx DSP? Only ONE? That's pretty crap for the price
>they ask! Why in the supremebeeings name didnt they make a 20+ DSP unit
>or modular DSP based on SIM sticks, it virtually cost nothing in HW to
>implement it!

Go ahead. Create it, build a prototype, mass-market it.

Then ask yourself (or Schaeffer, for instance) why you can't lower the
price, even though the plain hardware seems to be worth zilch to people
knowing on which end the soldering iron heats.

>To me it really sounds that a group of former uni studens took one of
>Mot's DSP dev boards and built a aluminium box around it! particularely
>when reading that a Coldfire is used to handle Midi and 4 front panel
>potentiometers! UGH!

Having no Chameleon myself but having looked at their product more than 
once I'd say the interesting part of their concept lies in the library, 
not so much in the hardware.

You can get devel boards from any DSP vendor for pretty much nothing, 
just kindly ask and they might even donate you one for free. But then 
you have to build the entire infrastructure like control processor, 
display/panel, basic libraries (button scanning, display, MIDI, ...) 
before you can start with what you really wanted to do, i.e. DSP 
hacking.

Honestly, I don't see your point. Yes, there is more powerful hardware 
available for quite some time. Yes, the pricing of the Chameleon is not 
exactly low-budget. But you buy it and you can start right with DSP fun.

Rainer