This weekend I've finally got around to installing and trying out
my DIY build of the original HardSID* ISA card, based on the design
here:
http://hardsid.8m.net

I wouldn't really argue with people who claim that Sidplayfp's
emulation is just as good as a real SID, though it requires lots of
processing power just to do the job of a chip sitting in one of
the dead C64s on my shelf. It's just a fun project.

Getting it working in Linux was a bit tricky and took me all
morning today, but means I can listen to it while posting this from
the same PC. Next I guess I'll have to get back to building my
Theremin, and eventually onto building my own (fairly scary) idea
for a new musical instrument.

Any other SID lovers or audio electronics tinkerers out there?

* A PC sound card using the 'SID' audio synth chip from a Commodore
64.
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- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
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On Sun, 17 Oct 2021, The Free Thinker wrote:

audio electronics tinkerers out there?

I'm not exactly an audio guy though; the most exciting thing I have
ever done with audio equipment around me was disassembling few of them
to replace failing parts, and that's it. My understanding of analog
transistor circuits is currently not enough for me to design one.

Getting it working in Linux was a bit tricky and took me all
morning today,

Congratulations! Does it require special driver and software to play?

Any other SID lovers

Well, I didn't have chance to experience the 8-bit home computing/gaming
stuff, and started out with PC; so... chiptune-wise, I'm more familiar
with something like Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262) which somehow got bundled with
my old C-Media CMI8738-based PCI audio card.

I have never programmed it with a real tracker, but I have played
around using a MIDI player on DOS called Midier [1] which I found
that it produced quirky but interesting sound. I have also played
the same card under GNU/Linux (ALSA MIDI) with instrument patches
loaded using alsa-tools' `sbiload`; while I found that it played okay,
the patches bundled there sounded way less impressive.

With no experience with tracker, and with no game that used the chip;
my usage just... never went beyond this, before the whole machine
got moved into the storeroom. My (very limited) experience in electronic
music creation mostly rooted in the land of MIDI; and my recent attempt
to tackle MilkyTracker bare-handed in the dark was also fruitless
so... back to MIDI again I guess.

If anyone know of any absolute beginner guide on how to arrange music
on MilkyTracker (that is also legible for one with no formal western music education and zero experience with tracker software in general), please tell.

I'll have to get back to building my Theremin

Great! Hope I'd build one someday; although I'm not sure if I would be
patient enough to practice and play actual music on it, hahaha.
For the time being, I make do with a lousy software-emulated theremin
installed on my Android PDA phone whether I was randomly in a mood
for ghostly wail... *Sigh* playing actual music on it is tough.

and eventually onto building my own (fairly scary) idea
for a new musical instrument

Electronic instrument I suppose? I'm also having some project in progress
that involves MIDI (not an instrument, but a very primitive form of
sequencer and synthesizer) that aims to retro-target some use cases
of yesteryear.

I also wonder what Wintergatan has been up to these days...

Anyway, good luck.

Cheers,
~xwindows


[1] It came with a TSR driver from Creative, which I suppose that it is
the part that works out MIDI events into actual commands for OPL3.
I have never found the documentation of its API. https://web.archive.org/web/20190118024711/http://www.pldos.pl/windos/midier.htm
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xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

On Sun, 17 Oct 2021, The Free Thinker wrote:

audio electronics tinkerers out there?

I'm not exactly an audio guy though; the most exciting thing I have
ever done with audio equipment around me was disassembling few of them
to replace failing parts, and that's it. My understanding of analog transistor circuits is currently not enough for me to design one.

Getting it working in Linux was a bit tricky and took me all
morning today,

Congratulations! Does it require special driver and software to play?

Yes there's a kernel driver module which I messed around trying to
build against the wrong kernel headers for a little while, and also
required a slight change to the code to get it to build against the
right ones.

http://hardsid.sourceforge.net/
It only supports up to kernel v. 2.6, so it's convenient that I'm
running a very old Linux install on this Pentium 1 anyway. Maybe it
wouldn't be so hard to build on a current kernel though because I
believe 2.6 was the last widespread change to the way kernel
modules worked. I bet that'd still take a lot more than one morning
to do though.

I thought the XMMS-SID plug-in for XMMS supported the HardSID. But
though there's some code in there for it and an option in the
config menu, it turns out it was never finished (still in the TODO
file) and non-functional. So I compiled the last version of
Sidplay2 and libsidplay, though that player is fairly awkward to
use and a bit buggy:
http://sidplay2.sourceforge.net/hardsid.html

Maybe I'll be able to track down the Linux version of TinySID with
HardSID support and try that sometime (I forgot to try the Windows
version when testing in Win98 actually): http://web.archive.org/web/20100904013553/http://www.rsinsch.de/?id=7298b&s=k2&lang=en

[I just wasted 15min making another search for Linux TinySID, so
the rest of this post is rushed]

Any other SID lovers

Well, I didn't have chance to experience the 8-bit home computing/gaming stuff, and started out with PC; so... chiptune-wise, I'm more familiar
with something like Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262) which somehow got bundled with
my old C-Media CMI8738-based PCI audio card.

I'm from the PC era as well, I just had relatives who were getting
rid of their old Commodore stuff (in turn accumulated from other
people getting rid of it). Back then my C64 sat next to my Nintendo
64.

I have never programmed it with a real tracker, but I have played
around using a MIDI player on DOS called Midier [1] which I found
that it produced quirky but interesting sound. I have also played
the same card under GNU/Linux (ALSA MIDI) with instrument patches
loaded using alsa-tools' `sbiload`; while I found that it played okay,
the patches bundled there sounded way less impressive.

With no experience with tracker, and with no game that used the chip;
my usage just... never went beyond this, before the whole machine
got moved into the storeroom. My (very limited) experience in electronic music creation mostly rooted in the land of MIDI; and my recent attempt
to tackle MilkyTracker bare-handed in the dark was also fruitless
so... back to MIDI again I guess.

I've never got into making music properly either. The HardSID will
probably only be used for listening to downloaded SIDs, though
there is a MIDI driver for it in Windows. I've tried to get into
composing in trackers many times, but haven't put enough time into
it. These days I think I spend too much time doing things at the
computer anyway.

I'll have to get back to building my Theremin

Great! Hope I'd build one someday; although I'm not sure if I would be patient enough to practice and play actual music on it, hahaha.
For the time being, I make do with a lousy software-emulated theremin installed on my Android PDA phone whether I was randomly in a mood
for ghostly wail... *Sigh* playing actual music on it is tough.

It works best with some form of accompanyment, eg. piano, from what
I've heard. I've got some ideas for extra features, though not
having played one myself yet (not even a pretend one) they're
probably premature.

and eventually onto building my own (fairly scary) idea
for a new musical instrument

Electronic instrument I suppose?

Maybe Electro-Inflammable? It's based around the concept of the
Flame Amplifier, or Flame Speaker, where an electic signal is
applied to a flame and produces amplified sound by ionisation.
The idea is to set up a large flame (1m+ high - flame length
determines the frequency range) within an enclosed chamber and
interact the resonance of the chamber with the vibrations from
electrically induced ionisation, adjusting both and experimenting
with feedback effects.

Integration of the flame as part of an oscillator circuit
controlling the signal for the ionisation/speaker part, following
these experiments:
http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/flame-amp/flameamp.htm
might be another interesting avenue of investigation.

One of my many mad scientist ideas that I never get around to.
I need to figure more out about making tall flames for starters,
without setting fire to too much (I do have the advantage of being
able to do these tests with an old fire truck nearby).

I'm also having some project in progress
that involves MIDI (not an instrument, but a very primitive form of
sequencer and synthesizer) that aims to retro-target some use cases
of yesteryear.

Neat, maybe less HardSID and more SIDstation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektron_SidStation
--

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The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

Maybe I'll be able to track down the Linux version of TinySID with
HardSID support and try that sometime (I forgot to try the Windows
version when testing in Win98 actually): http://web.archive.org/web/20100904013553/http://www.rsinsch.de/?id=7298b&s=k2&lang=en

The latest version still online seems to be here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050316025247/http://homepages.fh-giessen.de/~hg11001/binary_downloads.htm

It's only available as a very old binary, and needs to be run as
root to access the HardSID via /dev/port. But it does actually
work for me. Much smaller than Sidplay2 + libs (56KB vs ~3MB) and
hardly any CPU usage (from the 6502 emulation).

It doesn't use the HardSID kernel module that I mentioned earlier,
which I think is why it seems to be more affected by other programs
running on the machine even when there's lots of CPU time to spare.

But compared with Sidplay2, lack of songlengths.txt support means
it's not really as usuable for me.

Sorry if nobody here actually cares about details of software for
such extremely obscure hardware.
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
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The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

Any other SID lovers or audio electronics tinkerers out there?

Many years ago I had a little work shop area that I could work on
electronics with. Back before arduino and such. I didn't have a prom
burner though.

I've moved a few dozen times since then, and had to get rid of all my
old equipment. It really made me sad to have to leave it.

I can't collect stuff like that anymore, I don't want to have to lose it again... with a semi-nomadic lifestyle, things like that are luxuries I
just can't afford. Those esp32's look really interesting.

To answer your question, I never had the chance to put a SID chip in the breadboard and wire it up. I thought it would be interesting though.


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joe@raspberry.invalid wrote:

Many years ago I had a little work shop area that I could work on
electronics with. Back before arduino and such. I didn't have a prom
burner though.

I've moved a few dozen times since then, and had to get rid of all my
old equipment. It really made me sad to have to leave it.

I can't collect stuff like that anymore, I don't want to have to lose it again... with a semi-nomadic lifestyle, things like that are luxuries I
just can't afford.

I do sometimes pack all my essentials into a box and take them to
another place to finish a project. Actually I'm in a habit of
building presents for my mother, and usually I don't get them
finished in time before I leave to stay at her house for a few
days, so I pack everything up and spend my time there working late
into the night bathed in solder smoke. It's something to do besides
sitting around and getting into arguments at least.

Basically a soldering iron, DMM, and logic probe are all the main
things that I usually need. Besides the components, the most
essential of which I keep in plastic compartment-boxes such as
people use for fishing tackle and the like.

Well then there's also usually a hot glue gun, screws/screwdrivers,
hand drill, and comprehensive set of drill bits, for modifying
boxes to make into a case for whatever I build (building cards like
the HardSID to go inside a PC avoids that bit).

Then again back here at home I've got two rooms that could be
classed as electronics workshops, containing excessive numbers of
bookcases crammed with electronics and computer parts. Then
many thousands more in boxes in the shed that I slowly sell online.
Not to mention that my lounge room currently has broken laptops
everywhere which I'm trying to fix up and re-sell. But I do know
how to get by without 99% of it.

To answer your question, I never had the chance to put a SID chip in the breadboard and wire it up. I thought it would be interesting though.

I might as well conclude my earlier ramblings about software for
the HardSID card by noting that this 'Playrand' script is easily
modified to play files automatically in SIDplay2, which itself
lacks any playlist support (in Linux): http://www.shelldorado.com/scripts/quickies/playrand
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
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