The RS-232 debug port located at the back is used to upload new "skins" in the Chameleon, from the development environment running on a PC.
Although the development environment was considered as highly professional and facilitating as much as possible the design of "skins", the Chameleon remained a machine that required knowledge in multiple domains (MIDI, digital signal processing, real-time operating system, etc.).
Most users were expecting more skins to be available, with caught almost all resources from Soundart, leading the company in turn to bankrupt as it could not face the related costs.
A group of enthusiasts has created a dedicated website, in order to continue to provide informations to developers who want to write their own "skins".
[2] This website provides the whole documentation package, the original toolchain and the source code of a few commercial skins.
The maintenance of existing Chameleons is however quite difficult, since the two main chips (DSP and ColdFire processor) are not manufactured anymore.
These machines are computers, very similar to PC, running a special version of Linux along with a Wine layer to emulate Windows.
The inDSP systems are delivered with 3 plugins pre-installed, the Vocoder being available for free once users have been registered.
The communication protocol over USB and the Flash memory content are encrypted in order to avoid illegal copies between two systems of the same plugin.
However, a member of MIDIBox community has made a reverse engineering of the original hardware and has described a way to use the ASX/X-Synth as a low-cost platform for custom DSP code.
[8] This kit takes the form of a guitar effect pedal, which contains a 24-bit Freescale DSP56364, running at 100 MHz.
The DSP program is loaded by a micro-controller, in charge of the user interface and USB communication port.
In March 2016, the French company BEB has presented an open DSP platform solution, dedicated to sound synthesis, called HorusDSP.
The control boards can also get access to the local MIDI port, and it is possible to create a complete custom user interface.