[HN Gopher] Chipsynth C64 is an emulation of the SID so good, it...
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Chipsynth C64 is an emulation of the SID so good, it can replace
hardware
Author : adunk
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-12-07 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cdm.link)
(TXT) w3m dump (cdm.link)
| leptons wrote:
| Wow lots of hype about this out today - it showed up twice in my
| youtube feed.
|
| It does sound pretty good. Not sure it will see much use outside
| of demoscene musicians though. I would love to be hearing more
| c64 music in my life though, glad Chipsynth exists.
|
| Now what am I going to do with the half dozen SID chips I've been
| hoarding for the last 30 years?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Let me know if you want to get rid of them ;)
|
| (I think the Sidstation is the only synth I regret selling,
| well maybe together with the Jupiter-6)
| bayindirh wrote:
| There are bands which use SID chips/sound in their music, and
| they are not demoscene musicians.
|
| Machinae Supremacy comes to mind [0]. I esp. selected a song
| which their SID tunes are _very_ audible. Normally they do it
| way more subtly.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVnwR5C07I
| soundsubs wrote:
| I bought it yesterday and I'm loving it. It's really good! AND NO
| SAMPLES! I want to support developers like this who make
| something out of bounds with math instead of same old same old
| (samples, kontakt player, half done synth engine) I appreciate
| the level of detail and effort he put into this emulation, and it
| ALMOST cures my lust for a THERAPSID mk3.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| No samples? Damn.
|
| That was done by using 4bit sample data and using those values
| to set the audio level.
| oidar wrote:
| How CPU intensive is it?
| trinsic2 wrote:
| What do you need to run this?
| nickt wrote:
| 15 years in the making - incredible effort guys.
|
| Will we have to wait another 15 years for the ZX Spectrum
| version? :)
| wdfx wrote:
| AY emulation exists in https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace
| wdfx wrote:
| I recently came across https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace
|
| Super impressive tracker and emulator for many different 8 bit
| synth chips.
|
| As a personal project I'm also embarking on a 4x AY-3-8910 chip
| synth all hooked up to as esp32-s3 for usb midi
| wdfx wrote:
| More info about my synth build idea
| https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace/discussions/1605
|
| I already have the chips. 10x AY from AliExpress for PS7 and
| they turned out to be the real deal.
| mrob wrote:
| This appears to be proprietary software. If you prefer Free
| Software, reSID also provides very good SID emulation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReSID
| radarsat1 wrote:
| Although its sound is legendary, I can imagine it's not that
| complicated a chip. Had anyone ever tried to replicate it with
| discrete components?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The sound of SID comes from its architectural decisions and how
| the die behaves as an integrated circuit.
|
| IIRC, SID has no real mute on the outputs, so oscillators and
| output stage is always active. This, in turn, injects its
| legendary background noise to the generated sound regardless of
| there's a wave being generated or not.
|
| Moreover, the distortion itself is coming from the internal
| noise of the die itself, as a secondary effect of being an
| integrated circuit, plus its fabrication technology.
|
| As a result, the sound of a SID chip is result of its design
| plus the secondary effects introduced because of its
| fabrication process.
|
| This is what makes simulating a SID very hard. You need to
| characterize and formulate these secondary effects and inject
| them to your pure generation (design) simulation real-time,
| without much processing overhead.
|
| This is _really_ hard. Maybe not in the math department, but
| integration, coding, optimization and stabilization department.
|
| P.S.: This is why Machinae Supremacy started making music with
| real SID chips.
| whizzter wrote:
| In addition to this (and this is a huge part of what makes it
| hard to emulate) is that parts of the chip works in the
| analogue domain, that combined with the added
| outputs/noise/etc is what makes for the richness to be so
| hard to emulate.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're right. I forgot that some parts of SID is actually
| analog. Thanks for the addendum.
| crtified wrote:
| [see me answering my own question, at bottom of comment]
|
| Is there scientific data supporting the verbal "it's really good"
| and "we did lots of research" claims?
|
| Such as mdfourier testing and comparison with the original chips,
| or equivalent scientific scrutiny and comparison of the
| respective outputs?
|
| The claims may well be true, but the greater the claim to merit,
| the more robust the supporting evidence should be.
|
| [Answer follows: ]
|
| Yes there does appear to be some, at approx 10m45sec of this
| Youtube video which is contained within the OP link.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePq68HaI7M
| whizzter wrote:
| Skimming the article, it does seem like they've built a model
| (there has been much work over the years on opensource
| emulators,etc so the basic operation is fairly well researched)
| and then sampled a bunch of real chips to find variances and
| behaviours to get profiles that comes close to the real ones.
|
| As for being scientifically correct, Commodore was infamous for
| cutting corners so resistances (and prob other parts of
| fabrication) varied wildly so at best you can probably compare
| to specific chips (even if families of fabrication are
| closer,esp w.r.t to 8580 vs 6581 behaviours).
|
| Read the article again in that light (as those details are
| alluded to) or look at the analysis of the C-64 graphics chip
| colors (There is a nugget in the response from the Sid-chip
| designer at the bottom of this other article about Commodore
| inner workings).
|
| http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/
| leptons wrote:
| >As for being scientifically correct, Commodore was infamous
| for cutting corners so resistances (and prob other parts of
| fabrication) varied wildly so at best you can probably
| compare to specific chips (even if families of fabrication
| are closer,esp w.r.t to 8580 vs 6581 behaviours).
|
| It would be really neat if Chipsynth were capable of
| emulating those different resistances, to tweak them a bit to
| get a 'warmer' sound or something different, to allow further
| tweaking of the sound. I'm not sure if Chipsynth is emulating
| at the silicon gate level, or the analog circuits within the
| SID. Would be cool if it were.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| I have the Chipsynth MD, which is a Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis)
| based synth from Plogue and it's one of my favorite plug-in
| synths. It's pretty remarkable how much it nails the sounds from
| those games.
|
| This video shows some insight into the development process:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=VLxTHYGLKY0
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Wow! Some really cool sounds you can make with this setup
| MenhirMike wrote:
| The Plogue stuff is really high quality, though I wonder how it
| compares to their own chipsounds which already did the SID - I
| guess it's more all-encompassing of the different SID variants?
| Anyway, will give it a look later, this is neat! (Good to see
| they're explicitly calling out PWM, that's one of the key parts
| that made so much of the sound work so well on the machine)
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(page generated 2023-12-07 23:00 UTC)