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Chip music

The SID Septet

What would a whole ensemble of SID chips sound like?

That question kept nagging at me for quite some time, until one day, when I -- neglecting whatever important business I probably would have been better off doing -- sat down and began to arrange what was to become the world's first piece of music for seven SIDs.

The result: The "Vad faller..." ("What woodland...") movement of Lars-Erik Larssons Förklädd Gud (God In Disguise), arranged for a SID septet.

The parts are of course handcrafted in 6502 assembler. The envelope and timing of each note has been carefully tweaked, to get rid of the boring, quantized timing found in most computer-developed music. The pitches, however, are from an equally-tempered scale.

This recording is software emulated. Perhaps I'll make a real recording some day, if I can just gather enough C64s.

Source code

Added 1 Jan 2002: Here are the seven individual SID tunes, as well as their source code.

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triad
Linus Walleij
Wed 17-Oct-2007 22:05
As I mentioned once, an interesting concept would be to make a player program with all the tunes and set-up to run one as master and 6 as slaves, then a long, daisy-chained serial cable with 7 DIN jacks (these are open collector so should work OK) and bring all of this to a retro copyparty and PERFORM on 7 C64's! LCP (Little Computer People) or Floppy (HBG) are suitable settings. I had a vision of sound echoing out from all over the room accompanied by the usual copyparty sound environment, chips bags, people talking, videos (pr0n or zombie) running in the background, other SIDs.... The record the shebang as it happens in stereo. I think it'd make one hell of a live recording!

PS the word enter system kills me, it is impossible to see if some letters like S are lower-case or upper-case!
lft
Linus Åkesson
Wed 24-Oct-2007 17:25
An excellent idea! Remind me if we're going to a c64 party together sometime.

triad wrote:

PS the word enter system kills me, it is impossible to see if some letters like S are lower-case or upper-case!

Oops. That was supposed to be a case-insensitive check, but there was a bug. I fixed it. Thanks for reporting it!
Anonymous
Fri 21-Dec-2007 20:09
Hi!

Remember that our www.6581-8580.com project have already recorded this 7-sid tune
on real hardware to HQ MP3.

We recorded them to wav and only took a slight noise reduction and some high peaks clipping during the mixdown before it got converted to MP3, as our entire collection
consits of.

We recorded them for MOS6581R4, MOS6581R2 and CSG8580R5

If you want the files, I can send them to you!

Anyway we will be back online in Jan 2008

Regards Stone Oakvalley
Anonymous
Wed 9-Jan-2008 11:15
Wonderful!
-- grip