Modern SID chip substitutes [video] | Hacker News Reader

Modern SID chip substitutes [video]

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70 pointsvismit200012 comments

What makes the SID chip special are the analog filters. Otherwise, it is easy to emulate as the video shows. MIDISID 4 and Elektron SidStation can access the filters for a wide range of sounds.

SID piece from the beginning of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ

Long shot but who knows…

There was an awesome c64 music radio show on KDVS (the UC Davis radio station) back in the nineties, but I can find zero record of it existing. Does anyone on this thread know anything about it, or even perhaps have recordings?

Yes. I remember listening to it on the radio. The DJ used the handle Hard Hat Mack. It was pretty awesome to hear SID music over the radio.

I found this archive that has some of the shows recorded, and set playlists (I'm giving two links as the site is using frames so the top level page requires you navigate the menus to get to these):

  - Recordings: https://www.transbyte.org/SID/KDVS.html
  - Playlists: https://www.transbyte.org/SID/6581.html

The set playlists (using HVSC) works. For actual recordings they're 404 from this site -- arnold.c64.org is gone. But there are a few archives of the arnold.c64.org site! This should help re-construct the original links from the above page:

  - https://www.mmnt.net/db/0/0/arnold.c64.org/pub/sidmusic/lala/ra
  - https://archive.org/download/arnold.c64.org  (download the whole thing and dig into pub/sidmusic/lala/ra)

Due to the era, most of the files are in RealAudio format; with a few MP3s as well. Wonder if this could all be re-posted somewhere in modern formats to make it more accessible.

Its possible the authors are still around and have more copies; doubtful KDVS has archives, maybe tapes buried in the library.

Anyway, hope this helps! Its a cool piece of history and brings back a few memories.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a SID using transistors, capacitors, resistors. The fact that no one has done it makes me think it's just too difficult.

A light googlin says estimates are that the SID is maybe 2k transistors. I think a reasonable minimum is in the thousands.

logic could be in a CPLD or FPGA, leaving only the analog portion discrete.

At the speeds in question, I'm pretty sure the logic could be in a general-purpose microcontroller, too. But I'm not sure detailed schematics for the analog parts are available/open.

Similar idea: https://monster6502.com/

But note:

> Does it run at the full speed of an original 6502 chip?

> No; it's relatively slow. The MOnSter 6502 runs at about 1/20th the speed of the original, thanks to the much larger capacitance of the design. The maximum reliable clock rate is around 50 kHz. The primary limit to the clock speed is the gate capacitance of the MOSFETs that we are using, which is much larger than the capacitance of the MOSFETs on an original 6502 die.

So if you built a SID using the same techniques and components, you couldn't run it in real-time without the pitch being way too low or without modifying the design. I'm not sure how hard this would be to avoid with better-spec'd components, but intuitively it makes sense for a much larger circuit to run much slower.

Each one would fit perfectly on USBSID-Pico

Imagine a stack of 4 of them, nicely multi-timbral...

No need to imagine, just listen to this: https://youtu.be/nhz3vHYX0E0

Ok, 8 SID chips, but it sounds amazing.

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