Synth-O-Matic was a precursor to SuperCollider v1.
I used Claude Opus 5.5 to create a full-featured modern MacOS port of Synth-O-Matic for arm64. You can find it here: https://github.com/lfnoise/synth-o-matic
There is a downloadable release. All of the original source files are there.
The app includes a quick reference guide, which is about the only documentation there was.
The entirety of the prompt was :
❯ @SOM-classic/ is the source code for a classic-MacOS application called Synth-O-Matic. I would like you to make a full featured port of this to modern MacOS.
And in about an hour, I had a running app. I only made a few cosmetic tweaks.
That is pretty mind blowing that it takes so little effort to revive decades old software.
I have a few questions/thoughts banging about in my head about real, practical use of an LLM here – triggered largely, I think, because this use of an LLM by a developer whom I trust stands in sharp contrast to the hype that dominates the discourse in social media (e.g. “I’ve cloned Photoshop, software is dead” followed by reports that it’s only about 1/3 functioning, I am SO OVER this kind of thing… but Synth-O-Matic is not like that). Is that fair game for this thread? Or better for discussion by PM?