Two circuit boards with bright seven segment displays

Retro Stereo SID Synth Looks And Sounds Sensational

Over the years, plenty of work has gone into emulating the Commodore 64 6581 SID chip, but as [SlipperySeal] puts it, nothing beats the real thing. His take on the MIDI SID-based synth not only sounds fantastic, but looks the business.

The 6581 SID arguably blessed the Commodore 64 with some of the best sound capabilities of any home computer in the 8-bit era (make sure to ‘sound off’ in the comments if you disagree). The 6581 was a three-voice analog synth with a dizzying array of settings. This was at a time when most home computers could just about manage a ‘beep’ of varying lengths and frequencies.

When you mix MIDI with the capabilities of the SID, you get something like [SlipperySeal]’s awesome looking synth, known as ‘Monty’. While the road to this point unfortunately resulted in several blown-up SID chips, the sacrifice seems to have paid off.

Realizing the limitations of having ‘just’ three voices, Monty is designed to use two SID chips in parallel, for a total of six voices in pleasing stereo sound. MIDI commands are transferred to the dual SIDs by way of an ATmega1284p microcontroller. The SID is well understood by this point, and [SlipperySeal] goes into great detail explaining the fundamentals of SID programming over on GitHub.

This isn’t the first MIDI synth that is based around the C64 SID chip, but [SlipperySeal] made sure that his stood out from the crowd. The seven-segment display centered on the board makes for a delightfully simple visualizer, an effect that looks even better when running two Monty boards at once, each responding to alternate MIDI channels (check out the video below). Naturally, we’re also fans of projects that include ominous, cryptic keyswitches.

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Teensys And Old Synth Chips, Together At Last

The ancient computers of yesteryear had hardware that’s hard to conceive of today; who would want a synthesizer on a chip when every computer made in the last 15 years has enough horsepower to synthesize sounds in software and output everything with CD quality audio? [Brian Peters] loves these old synth chips and decided to make them all work with a modern microcontroller.

Every major sound chip from the 80s is included in this roundup. The Commodore SID is there with a chip that includes working filters. The SN76489, the sound chip from the TI99 and BBC Micro are there, as is the TIA from the Atari consoles. Also featured is the Atari POKEY, found in the 8-bit Atari computers. The POKEY isn’t as popular as the SID, but it should be.

[Brian] connected all these chips up with Teensy 2.0 microcontrollers, and with the right software, was able to control these via MIDI. It’s a great way to listen to chiptunes the way they’re meant to be heard. You can check out some sound samples in the videos below.

Thanks [Wybren] for the tip.

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