That’s cool. After M-vave's FM1 and TE's OP-1 revolution, going this path is almost mandatory for anyone with good hardware but a crappy interface. I'd love to love Polyend's software, but M8 is so far ahead in terms of power and intuitiveness.
The important thing about the alt firmwares is adding alternative and/or add new features.
But if you want to do FM synthesis, the other interfaces are just an opinion that is less integrated with the actual hardware side of the interface.
Other manufacturers could’ve done this. There are amazing F/OSS synth engines out there.
See also, the Zynthian hardware and the ZynAddSubFX synth.
I understand why someone can love Zynthian but it has little appeal to me…I’d rather have an MPC (they also run Linux) because of all the decades of design experience they embody and the volume of wisdom that I can access regarding them.
But that’s me, not you or anyone else.
They have effects, plugins, sampling, recording, etc.
Plus a pretty sophisticated DAW, robust hardware, and a lot of different flavors depending on what you want… And the ecosystem includes desktop tools.
The Xynthan looks like a playground for developers…and that’s cool. But I don’t want to deal with that.
When there’s an open source ecosystem for MPC like the one for Zynthian, it’ll be an interesting time indeed …
I can't find it now, but somewhere off https://shorepine.github.io/amy/piano.html it talked about the Android work you did.
Edit: There is https://github.com/shorepine/alles#thank-you-to but I remember a more detailed thing too.
I always notice your name because I enjoyed Advogato back in the day and keep using bits of your work elsewhere.