Quote:
Originally Posted by Havie
This is a wonderful tune - there's something special about chip music compared to samples and the SID does it best.
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Amiga 500 etc can do reasonable, for your average TV/monitor speaker, SID emulation thanks to Hakan Sundell and Ron Birk's routines.
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Samples are a double edged sword, you're at the mercy of the musician's standards when it comes to instrument selection and sample frequency of instrument samples. Ditto for SFX, it got old fast hearing the same old 'Battlestar Galactica' explosion in games.
With the SID you have to be an expert programmer AND a musician which is a bit of a negative. If you can understand what the guys from BBC's Radiophonic Workshop are talking about in interviews then great, if not then you will have problems making cool sounding instruments. It's quite a technical process and back then I never found a decent package to replicate the sterling coding efforts of Rob and Whittaker that did use undocumented features of the 6581 at the time. Not that being a musician using something like a Roland Promars analogue synth is any different, exchange typing in HEX codes with many many wire patches etc to get the cool sounds that make all the difference.
Also helps if you accidentally discover 3/4 of the SID oscillators are not mutually exclusive, you can set the bit for any combination of three waveform types triangle/sawtooth/pulse and the SID will use more than one oscillator on one channel. So you can easily get the sound of 6-9 channel SID audio from a 3 channel SID in some situations.
Here is a video showing the effect on an 8580 SID in my 1991 64C
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6581 also does it but the bias/timbre of the resultant combined waveform sound may be slightly different, not tried it. Need a monitor/TV with really good quality speakers for this too if I'm honest.
IIRC David Whittaker used some short waveforms and used those for EPIC like a sort of virtual analgue synth but the samples are so short they have that sort of SNES 'short sample' sound to them which I never liked myself vs rich samples of Agony/Beast1 etc etc