When we first covered [Markus]‘ portable SID player we starting dreaming about an alternative universe circa 1987 that included a pocket-sized music player called the Commodore ePod. [Markus]‘ updated firmware that connects his SID player to a PC will have to do for now, we suppose.
[Markus] on the DangerousPrototypes forum came up with a great little SID player.
The SID was (is?) the awesome sound generation chip inside the Commodore 64, and along with Game Boys and NESs laid the foundation for the chiptune scene. We’re happy to finally see a small SID player that doesn’t resort to SID emulation or a relatively huge MIDIbox.
The SID player itself is a shield on a CUI32 PIC dev board. The PIC32 emulates the 6510 and 6526 CPU and CIA chips found in the Commodore 64. A small USB memory stick stores the High Voltage SID Collection and the file system is navigated with an OLED screen. [Markus] says that the player draws 370 mA, so he runs it off a small wall wart. Still, we’re wondering if it’s possible to run this off of an SD card with a SwinSID so power draw can be reduced and a fully portable SID player can be realized.
We’ve got a touch of nostalgia for chiptune and demoscene music right now, so we’re going to listen to some [Nelly Furtado] [Janne Suni] right now, but you can check out the video demo [Markus] posted after the break.
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[thrashbarg] missed the sounds of the Commodore 64 and longed to hear the great masters in 8-bit glory. To get his fix, he created a midi device using the original Sound Interface Device from those long-dead systems. He’s interfaced the MOS6581 SID with an Atmel AVR ATmega8 microcontroller. The receiving pin for the AVR’s UART is used as a MIDI-IN connection, with the microcontroller converting midi data into the proper sound generation specs for the SID. The result is the 10 minutes of [Bach]‘s Brandenburg Concerto heard in the embedded video above.
We have no idea where he picked up this obsolete chip, but if you want to give this a try, perhaps you’ll have some luck emulating the MOS6581 by using another ATmega8.
We’ve discussed MIDIboxes before (and once before that), but we’ve never really told you what goes into them or how to build one. We’ll take you through the process after the break.
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