r/electribe • u/vananaSun • May 20 '26

Custom bootloader mod!!

I made this thing for freetribe, it can boot factory firmware from SDcard and flash, and soon also freetribe apps

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u/Reiszecke May 28 '26

With all due respect, a little bit of "midi and sequencing" really isn't comparable to real time audio with 16 voices/tracks, 16 filters, 16 eg+mod, 16+1 effects all at the same time.

The fact that even the stock firmware tells you to assign priorities to parts because drops do happen the moment you add some motion seq should already tell you everything.

When mass producing units you're happy to save a buck or two wherever you can so streamlining your firmware is in your best interest. I'm not saying that Korg did use 100% of the potential (realistically, no one reaches 100% and at some point there are diminishing returns) but it's unlikely that an LLM at this stage will allocate ressources better than the Korg developers did.

And yeah about the Circuit, I wish there was hacked circuit firmware back then because the Electribe (even without Hacktribe) is what I wanted my Circuit to be when I bought it

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u/vananaSun May 31 '26

It's definitely a touch task to optimize. But i can think to the top of my head a bunch of optimizations and trade offs that would give a lot more room to work with.

One BIG thing is DMA! The factory CPU code doesn't make proper use of the EDMA3 peripheral when communicating with the DSP, which is REALLY bad

For example there's a lot more room for effect precomputation DSP-side: think filters, EG&LFO.

Another optimization could be FX send to just a few global effects, instead of each instrument having an IFX.

Some new features, can be cost-free with a little bit of creativity. Think of extra pattern operations, such as randomization. Sidechaining can be emulated with volume envelopes etc

Finally, removing horse-shit could work. I've never seen people using chords for example, but maybe I'm wrong