
Interview with Bob Yannes, creator of the SID chip (1996) - mmastrac
https://web.archive.org/web/20090605222305/https://www.joogn.de/sid.yannes.html
======
unwind
It's really amazing that he claimed to not have heard any music by famous
composers on the platform.

I mean, it's not as if the world woke up in 2007 and thought "whoa, we can
make cool music on this old computer" \-- many of those (if not all, I'm no
expert) composers were active in the 80s when the C64 was current, and it's
hard to imagine him not seeing any of the hit games that came out on the
computer he designed.

~~~
yvdriess
The quote in question:

    
    
      Have you heard the tunes by Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, 
      Tim Follin, Jeroen Tel, and all the other composers ?
    
    
      I'm afraid not, are recordings available in the US?
    

I don't really know why, but that makes me feel sad.

~~~
pjc50
1996\. Before you could listen to every kind of music from everywhere at any
time on Youtube.

------
Scapeghost
I used to put a tape recorder up against the TV to record C64 game music :)

What the hell happened to video game music though? It used to be fun and not
afraid to sound nothing like any other genre. How did we go from (1) (2) to
the sterile sameness where everybody tries to imitate either Hollywood'ish
orchestra, hiphop or mainstream rock? I have to go far into the past to recall
the last time the soundtrack of a Western game stuck with me.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA95o7RNjqA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA95o7RNjqA)

2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b68n5FZ1ASg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b68n5FZ1ASg)

~~~
yowlingcat
This might be a little reactionary to say, but I think constraints breed
creativity. I have noticed there's kinda a line in the sand temporally where
not just game music but most music exhibits a cambrian explosion in quantity
but not necessarily differentiation. I may have posted this [1] before but I
think it's a great read, and you can likely see parallels between the points
it makes in pop music as in VGM.

[1] [https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-
pelly](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly)

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpts:

"The SID chip was my first attempt at a phase-accumulating oscillator, which
is the heart of all wavetable synthesis systems."

[..]

"It's pretty brute-force, I didn't have time to be elegant. Each "voice"
consisted of an Oscillator, a Waveform Generator, a Waveform Selector, a
Waveform D/A converter, a Multiplying D/A converter for amplitude control and
an Envelope Generator for modulation. The analog output of each voice could be
sent through a Multimode Analog Filter or bypass the filter and a final
Multiplying D/A converter provided overall manual volume control.

As I recall, the Oscillator is a 24-bit phase-accumulating design of which the
lower 16-bits are programmable for pitch control. The output of the
accumulator goes directly to a D/A converter through a waveform selector.
Normally, the output of a phase-accumulating oscillator would be used as an
address into memory which contained a wavetable, but SID had to be entirely
self-contained and there was no room at all for a wavetable on the chip."

------
burnte
I've heard people have decapped these and even recreated (in some fashion)
versions of the masks, or circuit layouts. I'd love to figure out how to start
a project making actual chips.

~~~
Jaruzel
Because the SID deals with analog as well as digital signals, it's not that
easy to clone, however you can get fpga versions such as the SwinSID -
[https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SwinSID](https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SwinSID)

Unfortunately, the SwinSID (and similar) do not sound anything like the
original chips when playing music.

Consequently SID chips are quite expensive to buy (relative to what they are)
- any effort to accurately clone a SID chip would be welcomed, as it will
drive the cost down of these chips on ebay etc.

~~~
herio
Sorry to be picking a nit here but the SwinSID is not FPGA based, it's a
software emulator running on an AVR mcu.

There is an FPGA based version of the SID called (surprise) FGPASID
([http://www.fpgasid.de/](http://www.fpgasid.de/)) which is pretty much
indistinguishable from an original SID. The only real downside to it is the
cost, it's not a cheap one.

The FPGASID was created by decapping and reverse engineering original SID
chips and the result is pretty spectacular.

~~~
JensRex
>it's not a cheap one

80€. You're right, it's not cheap, but I actually expected much worse.

~~~
SwellJoe
And, it emulates two SID chips and has multiple modes (6581 and 8580), so it
seems like a pretty darned good deal, honestly.

Real SIDs are pretty pricey these days, and they aren't making any more of
them, so they will keep climbing in price for as long as people find them
interesting. So, it's good to have an alternative.

------
mycall
I had an Ensoniq Mirage. When it didn't overheat, it was great for 8-bit 32Khz
audio with analog filters.

