The Virus TI series are truly impressive even.. or especially, by modern standards. 16 multitimbral parts, up to 90 voices... 20 years ago!
These days you can spend $1000 and get 8-16 voices without multitimbral feature. Hydrasynth Deluxe or Novation Summit in the $2k-3k range for 2 parts and total of 16 voices is considered good now.
Everything has moved to DAW centric workflows tethered to your computer and the hardware has really stopped innovating.
Sure, the DAW is king in the 21st century .. but hardware synths have their time and place. Access was one of the first to get hardware/software integration working with the TI - but as we can see, its a difficult thing to support, going into the future .. the TI plugin is no longer a viable feature unless you dedicate archaic hardware/OS to its functionality - however the synth hardware itself is still as operational and useful as it ever was. This is as true of the synth world as ever.
Its wonderful to have the Virus TI hardware working in a DSP emulator - one can only hope that eventually the reverse-engineering eyeballs will also tackle the TI plugin feature, some day ...
These days you can spend $1000 and get 8-16 voices without multitimbral feature. Hydrasynth Deluxe or Novation Summit in the $2k-3k range for 2 parts and total of 16 voices is considered good now.
Everything has moved to DAW centric workflows tethered to your computer and the hardware has really stopped innovating.