MOS 6581 aka SID chip

I know SID's are very flaky I've had one die on me but even so the demand still seems like an unnaturally high piss take.

Forgot: Do not plug the things into stereo amps unless you have a ground loop isolator

It was completely over-engineered for its purpose. And yes, it sounds fucking amazing. Luckily I built this a few years ago; it has dual SIDs.

I don't think it's as underground as you believe. The synth community knows about it, and there's the successful MIDIBox diy project. Timbaland also got sued a few years ago because he got caught stealing some music from a dude's SID file.

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> literally no song with more than like 15k views
youtube.com/watch?v=5RDSkR8_AQ0
56 million views

Here's a (non-chiptune) track I made with it. Every sound is from the SID:

picosong.com/w2LGd/

Yeah, but that's kinda what I mean
it might be popular among audio people as a synth, and yeah there's a shitton of music still being made, but the music itself made for the chip is not
youtube.com/watch?v=BAzIo-XwlOQ

I also don't like it just being used as a synth in a sound production pipeline, because you lose both the standardization of the tracker format and the challenge of making a single chip sound as best as you can, which is kinda the same point of the demoscene in general

Well you just answered your own question. Lofi chiptune stuff isn't for everyone. What makes the chip so amazing is that it in a modern production, it sounds as good as any other synth, even though it just needed to be good enough to make sound on an 80's computer. Normies don't care about how music is made or the particular challenges in the creative process. They just want a pleasing sounding product. Chiptune scene is too obscure for that.

That Wolnikowski track you posted was pretty cool.

>picosong.com/w2LGd/
nice dude that sounds really good.
i remember getting a sid chip off ebay like 10 years ago and making the v1 of the midibox sid by the ucapps.de guy. i wish i had made more stuff with it

Thanks. What happened to it?

I always lusted after this guy. Hands on control for everything, and up to fucking 8 SIDs.

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the sid is so over-rated it hurt.

im not a eurofag that grew with the Stockholm syndrome of shitty 8bit computer only era of gaming

Yeah I guess you're right
I don't even care that much how the music is made, but if all I wanted was synth-heavy stuff I'd just listen to synthwave or synth pop from the 80s, plus commodore music just generally has a positive/optimistic feel to it

I'm not either, I wasn't even born back then tbqh

youtube.com/watch?v=i4tIo6yCOo0

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bump

youtube.com/watch?v=x1JBlpYP61g

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what's that?

big version of this

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I like the OPL3 more, haters gonna hate

youtube.com/watch?v=5knetge5Gs0

>ayo technology

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>OPL3
mah nigga
youtube.com/watch?v=PEb5vJwYn-c

my thoughts exactly

>Why does it get no love
What? It's literally the most revered vidyagame sound processor of all time.
We had consoles too sweetie, just nobody cared about them until the 16bit era. Have you seen the absolute state of NES and SMS games?

>Why did this piece of technology sound so good?
because it had analogue filters. the MOS 6581 is a digital/analog hybrid and the height of human achievement

yes, the z80 still runs dumb fridges, etc

The hardware is a lot more approachable too, due to the sheer volume of SB16-compatible sound cards out there and the number of different ICs that feature an OPL3 core.

By comparison SIDs are practically worth their weight in gold nowadays with how rare they've become, not to mention having become kind of a meme for hipster enthusiasts.

This is exactly what I was on about.
Just making daft noises with it and taking all the fun out!
>up to fucking 8 SIDs
Fucking waste of 88 SIDs!
This is more like it!
Fantastic!
OPL made some great noises!
Nice!

Here's a fun cover and alright example of how a SID should be used:
youtube.com/watch?v=YyWpcOmZbbU

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If someone wrote the Jazz Jackrabbit soundtrack to run on one of these that'd be mad!
youtube.com/watch?v=usQzoyODH30

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>because it had analogue filters. the MOS 6581 is a digital/analog hybrid and the height of human achievement
I've seen people claim that the analog portion is why every SID is unique and no two sound exactly alike. Any truth to this?
Hearing Tom Sawyer on a C64 is what turned me on to synth. Totally blew my mind first time I heard it.

Can anyone help me identify where the main melody of this song comes from?
youtube.com/watch?v=uTeUxMCiTPU

One reason this is true is because in the SIDs analogue part there's a voltage controlled resistor which is used to control the filter cutoff frequency. Due to the way the VCR was implemented in the 6581 the response varies between chips due to differences in silicon impurities:
youtube.com/watch?v=X1eweFz1NDo

>By comparison SIDs are practically worth their weight in gold nowadays with how rare they've become, not to mention having become kind of a meme for hipster enthusiasts.
Didn't they sell 10 million or more C64s?

They did, but the thing is that the only way to obtain a SID is by gutting a whole C64 for it. Commodore never really sold their ICs separately in bulk like Yamaha did, many SIDs have gone bad since then, so there's going to be a lot less than 10 million. Which is also a pretty small number compared to how many SB16-compatible cards came out... Also Yamaha was making cards with a true OPL3 core in their chipset well into the early 2000s.

But on the topic of the SID, get a load a this:

youtube.com/watch?v=BxpiDyJ5MZU

those are high quality samples I'll give you that, but the tune itself is pretty boring

The YM2151 came out two years after SID and absolutely rapes it.
youtube.com/watch?v=VlT8aX9DRZw

sounds too MIDI-ish
part of the fun in the SID is the quirkiness it has because of it's basic circuitry. it's smart enough, but not too smart

Hey, I actually made that. AMA.

have you ever sucked a cock?

Good question: No. Have you?

it aint made anymore
its a good chip tho

when I get my fab business going first thing I'll do is pump out sids

It was designed by an engineer with an actual background in music, so it was fit for purpose.

I've got dual sids fitted in my C64, sounds great through the aux out.

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rob?

Nein.

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At least 12 million C64s and a couple million C128s plus you figure a few million more would have been produced as spares/replacement units. In all probably, we could guess about 20-30 million SIDs produced for a decade. How many have gone bad? That's hard to say.

Since I doubt you have a fab that uses that late 70s NMOS manufacturing Commodore had...no.

Like all sound chips, it's geared towards a certain aesthetic and you have to be able to appreciate that aesthetic. One thing the SID isn't good at is fast driving/rocker tunes. The NES 2A01 is great at that, but SID music always sounds sluggish.

Just take good care of yours and don't do stupid stuff like hot plugging cables or connecting it directly to a stereo amp. And don't connect any A/V cable to a C64 unless first testing it with a multimeter to determine which RCA plug is the sound one, since the SID will go up in smoke if you accidentally plug it in the video jack on a TV.

You know that thing isn't really connected to the Internet, it's just attached to a PC as a dumb terminal.

>sounds too MIDI-ish
Hipster logic strikes again.

The SID and CIAs tend to die easily because they aren't buffered from ESD. WDC does still make new CIAs but they're a modernized CMOS version that may not be 100% compatible with the original ones.

Recreating a new SID with modern production methods isn't actually that hard. The chip's core functions are trivial to implement. Where you do run into trouble are the MOSFET filters since those can't exactly be reproduced without NMOS fabrication.

Mumble rap > POKEY > SID

Which is better the 6581 or the 8580?

No, its running the Contiki web browser and it has an ethernet NIC stuffed in its cartridge port.

6581 for game music, 8580 for demoscene music. 6581 is a bit more bassy, but the filters can't perform some of specific tricks used in so it sounds different there

>video
the quality of the sound is absolutely astounding for an 8bit chip. fucking 80s were height of human civilization

I hate you, Commodore.

;plot a single pixel

Apple II

10 hgr2
20 hcolor=1
30 hplot160,100
40 geta$:ifa$=""then40
50 text

TRS-80 CoCo

10 pmode 4,0
20 pset (32,32),1
30 a$=inkey$:if a$="" then 30
40 pmode 0

Commodore 64

5 ba=8192:poke53272,peek(53272)or8
10 poke53265,peek(53265)or32
20 fori=batoba+7999:pokei,0:next
30 fori=1024to2023:pokei,3:next
40 r=int(160/8):c=int(20/8)
50 l=0and7:b=7-(4and7)
60 by=ba+r*320+c*8+l
70 pokeb,peek(b)or2^b
80 geta$:ifa$=""then80
90 poke53265,peek(53265)and223

>fucking 80s were height of human civilization
Nah, dude, nah.

Commodore 128 fixed this.

The YM2612 (+SN76489) still kicks plenty of ass.

youtu.be/WoAp2-gWaLM?t=2m43s

based user. sid music is nice but I can listen to AY music forever
youtube.com/watch?v=oIt4vku4uDQ
also good!

As well as the many fine C64 BASIC extenders.

I've been looking to get an STM32 board so I can play with DSP stuff and integrate with my modular. I'm gonna get the STM32F4Discovery. Good starter board? Also, I have MCU programming experience, but very little circuit experience aside from DIY kits, so the first challenge is gonna be to figure out how to hook up shit properly to the various I/O pins. I've seen some other shit people have made where they have opamps and crap at various places, but that's all magic to me right now. Good resources for basic circuit theory I'll need?

Thanks dude.

no desu hipsters love midi actually
but I just don't like the timbre of 16-bit midi shit

why not? CMOS can make N-FETs just fine innit?

Stop. There is no "MIDI sound". MIDI is just a protocol for sending note data and other messages to synths. The shit sound you're thinking of is due to the crappy sound chips used on PC soundcards (along with soundfont garbage).

>daft noises
What's daft about em? You realize there are actual notes and melodies right? It's kinda funny that you think the "right way" to use a SID is to get as much as you can out of one chip. That's a valid and neat way to use em, but it also somewhat undermines how good the chip can sound if you make use of all its functions towards a single sound.

no, MIDI just doesn't have enough dynamics and bandwidth to make proper tunes

How the fuck is bandwidth a problem? And 128 levels of velocity is more than enough for proper dynamics.

dunno I was just bumping the thread tbqh

8580s all sound the same while 6581s differ from batch to batch.

This is courtesy of the Programmer's Reference Manual. The routine they supplied for plotting a pixel isn't explained that well and it took some experimentation to figure out exactly what values it expects.

>daft noises

youtube.com/watch?v=LKYPYj2XX80

The most likely components in a C64 to go bad are the SID and CIAs because lack of ESD protection and the RAM (usually gets eaten by a bad power supply). PLAs in earlier breadbins also had a high failure rate.

Sure. So an easy place to get started with STM32 is by using what's known as a "blue pill" board similar to the one I was using in that video. The MCU is a STM32F103C8 and it's entirely Arduino compatible. They're super cheap on aliexpress too. Here is a great video on how to use one: youtube.com/watch?v=EaZuKRSvwdo

Discovery boards are fun to play with. I personally like using the NUCLEO-L452RE since it includes a built-in STLink programmer. If you don't want to use the Arduino tool chain, definitely try STM32 Cube MX. It will cut down on the boiler plate code significantly.

For basic circuit theory, I recommend the Youtube channels Afrotechmods and GreatScott.

Finally, if you're interested in how I made my players, I have open-sourced all of them so you're free to check out those schematics and code as well. Here's the one for my Genesis music player that also used the STM32 bluepill board.

github.com/AidanHockey5/STM32_VGM_Player_YM2612_SN76489

>Inb4 Github
Hope that helps.

There's one problem: The C128 BASIC graphics commands only let you set a single pixel color for hi-res bitmaps and three for multicolor, even though each 8x8 block can be a different color. However, it limits every block on the screen to the same color set.

Yes, the C64's BASIC was useless for anything much more than simple text mode stuff. I guess the idea was that you could buy a separate BASIC extender if you were interested in programming..

I remember using the Apple IIs in the school computer lab as a kid. The BASIC was a bit nicer and provided you with commands for drawing stuff, but the graphics and sound were crap.

The problem with BASIC extenders was that you couldn't share programs with other users unless they also had that extender. Pirated copies of Simons BASIC were all over the place, but nobody knew how to use it without the manual.

A whole lot of people never used their C64s or Amigas as anything but game consoles. The only BASIC command they ever typed was LOAD"*",8,1.

Very nice user

Do you do embedded/firmware work for a living?

It's more of a hobby, but I occasionally do IoT-related projects for work that often involve the same kind of microcontrollers. Most of what I know came from building those music players using old sound chips in the videos posted above.

Might want to heat sink the VIC-II and SID in any case because they get toasty.

I prefer the PC Engine audio output.

Almost everything post NES is preferable to SID. I reckon this thread is 10% euros with nostalgia goggles and 90% hipster faggots that need to catch the bug.

>comparing chips designed 8+ years after the SID
Is like complaining that a 1957 Chevy did not have Bluetooth.

I never imagined in my wildest dreams, when fooling around with this chip in machine code, with a DIY mechanical reverb, while lusting after my friend's Korg Poly 800, that it would be a thing in 2018. I hated how much gate thump it has with a short attack, but what do I know? Surprising to learn that some of the chips on the C64 mobo, including this one, can be killed with careless handling, since I abused it in ways not even mentioned here. Sometimes wish I hadn't tossed it with all the associated gear during a 2012 de-clutter binge of facing facts of mortality, but hipster connoisseurship of all things retro is in any case a form of denial I could never put into practice. Kept all the cassettes though, and shall go to my grave without a gap in the archives.

One thing the C128's BASIC still doesn't have is a way of creating custom character graphics (all the graphics statements deal with bitmap mode). Thus you will still have to create character sets the old-fashioned way via POKE statements.

>Surprising to learn that some of the chips on the C64 mobo, including this one, can be killed with careless handling
They can, and in the case of the Plus/4's TED chip, the thing will gladly commit suicide all by itself with no assistant required.

I compared one two years after SID and was told it sounded too good. You hipsters need to make up your mind.