Hi agree totally with you. I think there are lots of reasons that backup the development of a modern alternative as complete to modern days as the old SSL computer was back in the day... and please don't let my small project tell you the opposite. I'm just trying to do a small piece of software to help users keep their projects backed up without having to rely on those floppies, which is a totally different best to deal when comparing to replacing the entire computer. We have already some projects that are cooking to do this for some years now and they haven't seen yet the light of day as a commercial alternative, and that should give a pretty idea how big and complicated the task is, even with modern tools (specially for a 1 man job).
The best and less painful way to approach this "ginormous" challenge should come in the form of a community effort. I have 15 years of active experience on the opensource community supporting several projects and I always experienced that community contributions help projects see the light of day and survive time. I have to be honest here, SSL doesn't give any more support and these desks are getting old. Up until now the community as make an awesome job compiling an insane database of info and in actively helping SSL users maintaining their consoles. Trusting that this commitment will grow and the numbers of talented contributors too, I believe any solution for the SSL computer should come directly from the community and not from a commercial alternative, since as I see it, in the latter approach we'll be leaving one "closed proprietary technology" to another and that will just postpone the problem until the manufacturer bankrupts, drops the product and give support no more. In conclusion, you will be left with another brick for your collection. This leads me to another issue, for the community to be able to do this we need more information about the SSL computer and its link with the console, so we can understand it fully and design a complete alternative and, hopefully, much more powerful. It's not an easy task to get this, and reverse engineering takes many many man-hours, as Pelle testified it in person. The best would be to have access to development documentation that would explain in detail the technology. With this info in our hands, I know we have talented electronic and software engineers that could make this possible. This is a topic that I will address soon in it's own thread.
A community solution (doesn't mean free) will endure time and give us the freedom to evolve the solution to accommodate our needs. Also will be much cheaper to accomplish, both on a financial and personal-life cost. This wouldn't be a 1-2-3 man job, but a job of the many in the community.
I leave you with these thoughts, comments are welcome!
Cheers,
Artur
Is there a reason one has to recreate what a 30 year old computer did? Wouldn't it be much more forward to think how can we integrate these babies into the new more modern work flow. Shouldn't we be looking at how to integrate the recall into a Daw session or into just a modern program and how the automation of the VCA or Ultimation faders can be controlled from any standard DAW. We all know that the automation of the SSL can easily be run by any current smartphone. It is creating the hardware to convert the data to a useable format that is the hang up although there seems to be progress on that front by Pelle and Dramastic.
Thoughts?
