I’m a geek, you’re a geek, we’re all geeks.
And geeks like to listend to chiptunes – music made by computers. The commodore 64 being one of the most popular gaming platform of all time had quite it’s share of music composed for it.
Part of the reason being the Sound Interface Device (SID) chip within the computer. When the SID chip was released, it was re-vo-lu-tion-ary. The chip was used not only in computers, but also in synthesizers. That’s how good it sounded.
Today’s article will explore how to use the Commodore 64 as a SID music player.
Click here for more articles on the Commodore 64One of the most popular ways of storing and playing back music that is aimed at the C64 SID chip is trough an appropriately named .sid file. There are numerous files available online, may it be music from demos, games, song conversions or compositions. There are websites dedicated to collecting and cataloging .sid files, such as High Voltage SID collection (HVSC).
HVSC have a searchable database, which is useful as it permits to not have download the whole content and browse trough the set of over 55,000 SID files, in order to locate something to listend to.
Software
There are multiple software out there to play .sid files HVSC has a comprehensive list of such software for various platforms – mac and windows comes to mind. Only a handful of them are aimed at using the SID hardware on an actual commodore 64 to play music.
Ultimate SID player
Those with an 1541 Ultimate cartridge can use the onboard Ultimate SID player to play the .sid files. The Ultimate carts adds multiple capabilities to the commodore 64, including a way to load software from an SD card.
SidPlay64
SidPlay64 is the most popular .sid file player on the commodore 64. It is originally designed to use the floppy drives of the Commodore, but ulterior versions have been made for the following hardware:
- SD2IEC
- 1541 Ultimate II w/ REU
- SD2IEC w/ REU
- 1541 Ultimate w/ netdrive & REU
- SidFX & REU
- Pi1541
Altough the variant for Pi1541 is a patched version not officially supported; it is found on page 58 of the pi1541 thread on Lemon64 forum – pointing to tom-cat’s version [right-click, save as] on pc.sux.org. Other versions are available on the files section of the SidPlay64 website.
The idea is to load up the SidPlay64 software on a disc (or disc image) and then open another disc (or disc image) that includes .sid files to load and play.
Setting up SidPlay64 on a Pi1541
To use SidPlay64 on the Pi1541, best is to prepare a D64 image that includes .sid files. This can be done using an D64 editor software, to put SID files in an empty disc image.
This D64 disc image can be copied along with tom-cat’s version [right-click, save as] of SidPlay64 on the Pi1541’s SD card. On the pi1541, selecting SIDPLAY64.PRG to mount, loading it as usual (LOAD”*”,8,1 and RUN) and then mounting the SIDCOLLECTION.D64 disc image would lead to Sidplay64 to recognize and correctly load the music files.
cool mods
If an IRQ mod was installed on the Commodore, the SID player will de facto have interrupts anytime a sound is played. This means, the power led will blink between red/green/orange, somewhat following the beat of the music in a more-or-less visible pattern. Some SID files will have a much more visible effect, while others will mainly stay lit orange – YMMV.
Video does not give the effect much justice, but there it is.
Regardless, it is a cool yet undesigned feature.
Keep on geeking!
Related articles
High Voltage SID collection (HVSC)
HVSC search (HVSC)
SidPlay64 (sourceforge)
HVSC SID players (HVSC)
Pi1541 (Steve White)
Pi1541 thread (lemon64 forum)
Pi Sidplay zip (pc.sux.org)
SidPlay64 files (sourceforge)
D64 editor (d64editor.com)
IRQ Mod (wereallgeeks)
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