If we had the tools in house we would have added the feature because, lemme tell you, it was high on our list. But the reality of the chip we chose and the tradeoff of fixed part cost vs. development cost (due to lack of good tools and needing to program entirely in assembly among other things) just made it a really bad idea in the end. We learned from our mistakes and have changed our approach since, which is why the Prophet X is more solid, we have more control over the dev process now
I ended up spending vastly more time into Tempest development than was required, lots on my own after hours, and fixed numerous timing and other problems but eventually it became a battle with an underpowered chip and my own inexperience. I'm confident I can do 10x better now but that was my first time doing a complex OS on my own, honestly I'm pretty happy with how well it turned out given all the constraints we had
Just saying, try not to make assumptions, there are a lot of things behind the scenes we don't share but it doesn't mean we're only concerned about making money. This is a labor of love for us first and foremost, we are all artists and musicians here and want to see our vision come to fruition, but sometimes we shoot a bit too far, personally I'm glad we keep challenging ourselves and taking risks
"Would be fun to make a drum machine based on this kind of technology, not that we're doing that immediately, but... "
I like the bit just after that where he says something like 'Of course we've got lots of new stuff coming out, that's what we do'!
Rather than maintain, update and/or finish the 'old' stuff!
If Sequential REALLY wanted to, they could fix the Tempest... I'm certain of that... it may be that the samples-chip is hard to change the samples in, but I'm sure they would have the tools to do this in house if they wanted to... and if they wanted they could just offer users to send in their Tempest, and have their chips reflashed with a sample set without any clicks in the single cycle waveforms... and if they are running out of codespace, they could rewrite the code again from the ground up, and take out a lot of those extra features that was not even meant to be in there from the time they designed the machine... i recall Linn saying that it now has more features than he would have done himself, suggesting that they simply stressed the Tempest beyond it's capabilities.
They COULD fix Tempest... but they won't... there is no profits to be gained by it, and that's probably the real reason nothing more is happening with it.
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