Three recreations of legendary video machines of the 70s and 80s, conceived not as museum emulators but as instruments: tools you pick up and play live.
Every feature starts from a real machine — Sandin IP, DPE 5000, Paintbox — and from what it actually did. Nothing is invented: the documentation is the source of truth, and the engines render the images shown here themselves.
Faders, T-bars, pressure stylus: everything is played in real time. The captured performance — gestures, sequences, automation — becomes the render, identically on export.
Settings, gestures, MIDI mappings, consoles, projects: everything is in readable JSON, hand-editable and copyable from one machine to another — from macOS to Linux for Sandin FX.
These three native macOS applications (Swift, SwiftUI, Metal) share the same technical foundation: a shader compiled at runtime, AVFoundation for video, a shared real-time recording system. What was learned on one served the next. The goal is not nostalgia, but to put back in your hands gestures that all-software has made disappear: patching a signal, working a lever, painting with the stylus over a live image.
Sandin FX also exists in a Linux version (SDL2, OpenGL, Dear ImGui, FFmpeg), with the same presets and the same files — the GRASS code keeping its Metal dialect, so that the examples and the tutorial remain valid from one platform to another.
For any question about the software, the documentation or a collaboration: