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.

The new firmware boots the Portable SID player as either a standalone device, or a ‘Network SID Device’. The portable SID player can now operate as the output device for either Acid 64 or GoatTracker. Now, [Markus]‘ SID player has the same feature set as a HardSID, or the long-forgotten SID Card.

[Markus] can play 40,000 SID chiptunes and can access all of them a lot easier than he could with the jog wheel on the original build. The new firmware is cycle-exact, meaning the sounds coming out of this SID player would be exactly the same as if they were played on a C64. We’d love to build one of these ([Markus] made the entire project open source), but gutting a C64 for the required SID just seems wrong. There are other ways to acquire a SID, though.

Check out the demo of the Network SID Device below.

[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.

[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.

This particular MIDIbox by [Subatomic] is built on the MIDIbox SID specs originally conceived by [Thorsten Klose] (check out the great sound samples) and streamlined by [Wilba]. It uses a Commodore 64 case, 8 of its SID chips, and the power supply, but gets most of its other parts from various different sources. The Commodore’s SID or Sound Interface Device, was one of the first sound chips available in a personal computer.

In the worklog, a SID module, the first of four, was built before anything else. Then [Subatomic] opened up the Commodore case and attempted to fit a number of modules into it. For the MIDIbox’s power, he converted the original Commodore power supply to provide 14VDC and 5VDC, but learned much later that this would only give enough power for 4 SIDs, resulting in a mono MIDIbox. He continued by adding a power board and noting that with the core and SID modules and the audio mixer board, it’s a tight but workable fit.

The next several steps involved designing and building the control surface. After creating a mockup and acquiring several components like knobs, LEDs, and a small LCD, [Subatomic] began building many of the necessary control surface PCBs, including the filter control PCB and a few others.

[Subatomic] went on by going through the painstaking process of creating backlights for the knobs. After that he acquired the custom-made front panel, created the LCD module, and attached it and several PCBs to the panel. The panel was then painted.

After a little work on the PSU and the rear I/O panel, [Subatomic] prepped some banksticks (external storage accessories; think USB stick forerunners with a female serial jack).

After finishing and gluing the LEDs to the knobs, the panel was finished. At this point Subatomic decided to scrap the SID, core, din and dout modules in favor of a single PCB that does everything. He cut the board to make it fit in the case, cut headers, added resistors, burned out the LCD, did a lot of spot-checking on the wiring, and then he finally added the SIDs to the board.

He soon zeroed in on the power supply problem that was only routing enough power to 4 SIDs by replacing the malfunctioning C64 PSU with a good one, after which the LCD was also replaced. The wiring diagram above shows how the remaining modules would be wired to the main board.

The only software work involved adding functions for 2 special buttons to the preexisting firmware and recompiling it. He realized that the MIDIbox was missing a mixed output jack, so he added than and made several minor cosmetic mods. With these final fixes, the MIDIbox SID was completed. If you’re considering this project, be aware that it’s a major endeavor with a lot of detail work that took [Subatomic] nearly 3 years to build, but the reward is a slick-looking, fully functional MIDIbox SID of your own.

[via Matrixsynth]