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Comment by bronikowski | Hacker News Reader

Am I blind or are there no SID modules? C64 is like 90% of tracked music that I'm listening to. :(

In the scene people always set SIDs and tracker chiptunes apart, because of how technically different the two are. There's an enormous technical complexity of having to emulate not just the SID chip (which still isn't 100% understood) but also the 6510 CPU and even some of the C64's CIA timers to accurately replay SIDs, whereas almost all sample-based tracker music from the Amiga and PC need none of that effort. Replaying SIDs is even more complicated than emulating e.g. SPC700 of the SNES, the PSG sound of the SMS, or the YM/OPN2 synthesizer of the MegaDrive.

Meanwhile, there's GoatTracker (tracker for SID music).

And SID Factory and a couple of others.

Any recommendation for Multi-SID? There should exist a six channels GoatTracker - I am not sure anything else is available.

cheesecutter apparently also supports dual sids: http://chordian.net/c64editors.htm

> also the 6510 CPU and even some of the C64's CIA timers

yes, but also the VIC timers and the PLA. So basically you need all of the c64 chips emulated, at least in part :)

I wrote a simple SID player for fun and I feel like it's 20% shy of being a full c64 emulator, all it needs is video output and keyboard/joystick input.

I have a physical SID chip and I was looking at implementations of players and ... was shocked at how complicated they are. I guess it makes sense though: SID files are tiny because they are in effect full C64 native programs that generate music. It would be hard to do otherwise on that platform.

I wrote a simple program that transformed basic (60hz, no PCM-style hacks) SID programs to like sequence of byte instructions for the SID chip so that I could replay without emulating and the file sizes are massive compared to the original!

Here is an awesome single file SID player written in C,

https://github.com/mlund/csid/blob/master/csid.c

Oh, wow! Such a compact cpu routine! Thanks for the link.

I wrote mine in C too and it's basically a 1k line switch statement for every 6510 instruction :) I went the extra mile and made it cycle-accurate though.

libsidplayfp is probably the best emulator out there. It actually emulates voltage levels at one stage. The wiki has a bunch of info on SID reverse engineered from die shots https://github.com/libsidplayfp/SID_schematics/wiki

Sample based tracker formats shouldn't be considered chiptunes. The latter is supposed to mean sound generated by dedicated hardware with automatic waveform generation, envelopes, and filtering. Doing it all in software by mixing samples isn't the same.

Sample-based tracker music and the Amiga scene is where the term and the artistic style was born. The Amiga scene and the musicians of that era are the authority.

That's where "tracker" originated. "Chiptunes" are a more recent denotation and imply hardware generated sound different than a tracker.

The term chiptune, and the technical approach and associated musical character, was firmly cemented in the Amiga scene already in the first half of the 90s. The composer who coined the term (in the beginning of the 90s) was legendary computer musician Matt "4-Mat" Simmonds. Everyone understands the difference between oscillators and sample playback, but notwithstanding the term being "technically lopsided" this is still the history of it.

May I recommand to you the High Voltage Sid Collection? It is a collection of curated SID songs in a neat package, and it is updated regularly! https://www.hvsc.c64.org/

Oh, I have HVSC, probably on most of my devices. I was expressing surprise about the project's lack of SIDs not my lack of it! :-D

The whole HVSC is available on DeepSID, an online SID player: https://deepsid.chordian.net/

To be fair, nobody called c64 music "chip music", it was just "music/tunes" because c64 music is really just code so in a way all of it was chip music (excepting some digi tunes).

The term chip music was coined on amigas and newer computers to differentiate it from regular sample based music.

C64 modules here: https://chiptune.app/browse/Game%20Mods/-%20Arranged%20-/

Of course these are indeed modules, arrangements by someone else than the original composer, and not SID tunes per se.

Now you get an entire thread of nerds explain you the etymological history of sound chips and the huge differences between a sid program and the mid format despite having perfectly working converters in both directions.

You are not blind! This is my personal bias showing, I should really add SID modules to the catalog.

Yeah, it’s a bit strange omission.

Playing samples in patterns and computing coded sound are completely different efforts.

But the site already has tons of tracker music, as well as other not-strictly-chiptunes like an incredible number of .mid versions of classical music and contemporary pop songs of all things.

Tracker files: audio samples as instruments played by a table of notes and variations.

MIDI files: a table of notes and variations for playing default samples for instruments.

Chip synthesis programs: code that generates sequences of sounds, requiring some specific synth engine.

The former two have a radically different (lack of) complexity compared to the latter...

I know, but I don't understand your point. The site is full of .mids and mods, as well as other mod-like formats ripped from various devices. I'm not even sure if it does have any actual chiptunes, as in synthetized in realtime!

You wrote that you find it a «strange omission» not to have included SID tunes in a collection of «mids and mods». Well, simply, the coder must have had an engine capable of playing the latter, which is simple - and not an engine capable of playing the former, which is complex.

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