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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

> Only drawback seems to be it's gonna be difficult to get performance real-time enough to use as an actual musical instrument.

Kinda depends on whether the "sound chip" is emulated. For example, the MOS6581 doesn't seem to be emulated here. You could emulate the UI and controls of an Elektron SIDStation, but you wouldn't be able to get the sounds to play unless you had a real SID chip in there. So in that sense, just running the UI and controls would be fine for an emulator if there was a real MOS chip somewhere to take in audio.

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I'm confused. There might not be one in Mame right now, but there's dozens of SID chip emulators. For example this website uses WebSID to play SID tunes in your browser: https://deepsid.chordian.net/

> For example, the MOS6581 doesn't seem to be emulated here.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/soun...

The MAME and MESS trees have been reorganized a few times so I can't just track one file back easily but so far I've chased SID entries in MAME back to at least 2006. It's one of the defining features of a very popular platform, of course it's going to have at least some level of support.

MAME emulates the SID but the code dates back to like 2004 and doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the modern SID emulation engines. We prefer BSD or MIT licensed components to GPL ones so there's been some hesitation to just grab one of the popular SID engines (and our base C64 emulation is generally decent if you aren't trying to break the hardware like most demos, but it's also slow because the mapper PLA is emulated in the hot path).

That SID I think it's emulated since the first emulators for the C64 if not before.

Of course the sound chip is emulated. That's the purpose of MAME. It emulates everything in the original hardware, sound included.

For quite a while, MAME didn't always emulate sound chips. A number of games early on worked by way of prerecorded sound samples triggered at the appropriate times.

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