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C64 / SID

platform 149 pages
  • Channel interleaving (one channel, two jobs) techniqueWhen channels are scarce, interleave: bass note on every even 16th, melody notes on the odd ones. Played fast, the ear separates them into two lines — a bassline and a lead — from a single channel. The same idea works …
  • Chip samples — tiny looped waveforms techniqueIn a sample tracker, a "chip" is a very small looped sample — a single waveform cycle or a few hundred bytes of a real instrument — that stands in for a sound-chip voice. A chiptune module is built from nothing else, …
  • Chord arpeggio (the 0 3 7 trick) techniqueChips rarely have enough channels for real chords, so one channel cycles through the chord tones extremely fast. At roughly 25–50 notes per second the ear fuses them into one shimmering chord — the signature chiptune …
  • Detune techniqueIf you can spare a channel, play the lead on two channels a few cents apart (or use a fine-tune setting). The slow beating between them sounds huge — the chip version of a supersaw. Small detune (5–10 cents) = fat; …
  • Fake echo / delay techniqueRepeat each melody note after a fixed time (say 3 or 6 pattern rows) at much lower volume, and again even quieter. On a spare channel it becomes a lush echo; on the same channel, placed in the gaps of the melody, it …
  • Filter programming on the SID techniqueThe sid has one filter shared by its three voices: an 11-bit cutoff, a resonance nybble, per-voice on/off switches ( $D417 ) and a band selection — low-pass, band-pass or high-pass ( $D418 ). Sweeping cutoff and …
  • Hard restart techniqueA player-routine trick that gates a sid voice off and loads a special ADSR value one or two frames before the next note, so that every note's attack starts from a known envelope state. It exists because of the SID's …
  • Instrument design beats note count techniqueA lot of "chiptune magic" is in the instrument, not the pattern: a fast pitch drop at note start makes a kick out of any voice; a couple of frames of noise before a tone makes a snare or a pluck; a tiny downward pitch …
  • Levels and headroom techniqueNot "how loud", but how much room is left above the loudest thing playing . Every layer of a chiptune has its own ceiling — a 4-bit register on the chip, a 00–40 or 00–80 scale in the tracker, 0 dBFS in the render — and …
  • Multisampling and drum-kit instruments techniqueOne sample cannot cover a keyboard: transposed more than a few semitones it sounds artificial — ±7 at the very most, often only ±1 (source: s-tw084-perfect-samples-the-piano ) . Multisampling records several keys and …
  • Multispeed (framespeed) techniqueCalling the player routine more than once per frame. sid-wizard supports up to 8× framespeed, i.e. 400 Hz SID control instead of 50 Hz, which gives finer resolution for pulse-width-modulation , filter-programming and …
  • Octave bass techniqueThe oldest trick in dance music and chiptune alike: alternate the bass note with the same note one octave up ( 0 12 0 12… ) in straight 8ths or 16ths. Instant drive, zero extra channels. Variants: octave on the …
  • Pitch slides and tone portamento techniqueGliding into a note (tone portamento) or bending a note's pitch up/down (pitch slide) — the cheapest way to add emotion. Classic uses: slide up into the highest note of a phrase, slide down at the end of a phrase, slow …
  • Pulse width modulation (PWM) techniqueA pulse wave's character depends on its duty cycle: 50 % is hollow and round, 25 % brassy, 12.5 % thin and nasal. Sweeping the width while a note plays makes a single channel sound alive — the classic C64/ sid shimmer …
  • Randomization and probability (MayBe, RandomiZe) techniqueLetting the tracker decide: notes that play only sometimes, table hops that happen with a probability, and command values with a random offset. Cheap variation for hi-hats, fills and long loops — every pass sounds …
  • Ring modulation and oscillator sync techniqueTwo of the sid 's control-register bits couple a voice to its neighbour: sync ( $02 ) hard-syncs one oscillator to another, ring ( $04 ) replaces a voice's triangle output with a ring-modulated combination of the two. …
  • Shuffle, swing and FunkTempo techniqueDelaying every second 16th slightly turns a stiff pattern human — shuffle/swing. Trackers do it with groove or speed settings rather than with note positions (source: s-037-lab ) .
  • Sidechain pump techniqueDuck the volume of chords and bass at every beat, then let it swell back before the next one. It creates the breathing, pumping motion of modern dance music — even with no kick drum playing at all (source: s-037-lab ) .
  • Song initialisation and looping techniqueMaking a module start and loop correctly in any player — the "finishing touch" most often forgotten, according to catspaw : default speed, tempo and pan positions in the song header apply only once, so a song whose last …
  • Sound effects and game audio techniqueThe other half of a game soundtrack: short, non-musical events — a shot, a jump, an explosion, the "Game Over" — fired by the game code, on the same three voices the music is using. It was most of the paid work. …
  • Vibrato and delayed vibrato techniqueA periodic pitch wobble on a held note. The important variant is delayed vibrato: the note lands straight, then the vibrato fades in — real singers and lead synths don't wobble immediately. Straight attack + late …
  • Wavetable programming (waveform / arp tables) techniqueChanging a voice's waveform (and pitch) every frame from a table — the way C64 instruments get their attack transients, percussion and arpeggios. A couple of frames of noise before a tone makes a snare or a pluck; a …
  • ADSR envelope conceptAttack · Decay · Sustain · Release: the volume contour of a note. On the sid it is hardware — two registers per voice (attack/decay, sustain/release, one nybble each), started by the gate bit and released when the gate …
  • Chiptune — what the word means conceptTwo related things share the name:
  • Instrument tables (wave / pulse / filter) conceptOn the sid — and on the game-boy in lsdj — an "instrument" is not a sample but a small program: a set of tables that the player steps through frame by frame to change waveform, pitch, pulse width and filter while a note …
  • Live tracking — performing with a tracker concept"You cannot perform tracking live" (Behemoth, 1997) drew four answers that together describe how sceners actually did it: pattern switching on cue, live instruments over the module, channel muting, and playing a …
  • Orderlist (sequence) conceptThe list that tells a tracker which pattern plays next; in C64 trackers each track has its own orderlist, so tracks can loop patterns of different lengths independently. Besides pattern numbers it can carry song-level …
  • Player identification (pattern searching) conceptTelling which music routine — which sid-player-routine — a .sid file was made with, by looking for a short sequence of code bytes that only that routine contains. Stefano Tognon set the method out in sidin #3 and #5 …
  • SID player routine, rastertime and player types conceptOn the commodore-64 the music is played by a small machine-code routine called once per frame from an interrupt. It costs two things a game or demo cares about: memory and rastertime (CPU time per frame, measured in …
  • Synchronisation with other gear conceptRunning a chip tracker in lockstep with another Game Boy, a drum machine, a DAW or a modular. Both focus trackers support it natively.
  • The PC tracker scene 1995–98, as it saw itself conceptWhat traxweekly 's writers said about where tracking came from, how music moved around, who judged it and where it was going. This is the scene's own narrative, mostly written by teenagers in an afternoon; for checked …
  • Tracking workflow — advice from the scene conceptHow experienced trackers of the 1990s said to work — most of it still true for sid-wizard and lsdj .
  • Writing melodies that work conceptTwo questions decide a melody note: is it in the current chord? and is it on a strong beat? Chord tones on strong beats (rows 0, 4, 8, 12 of a 16-row bar) make the melody sound anchored; non-chord scale notes are …
  • 4mat personScene musician-coder whose 512-byte Empty won the tiny-sid-compo 512-byte category in 2005, and one of the most-quoted voices in the wiki's chipmusic.org threads — dissecting SID tunes from siddump logs, posting the …
  • 64'er (magazine) publicationThe German C64 magazine (Markt & Technik) that ran the 1986 music competition chris-huelsbeck won with shades and then published his soundmonitor as "Listing des Monats" in issue 10/1986, pp. 53–64 — "the biggest …
  • ACID 64 toolWilfred Bos's SID player for HardSID and catweasel cards: instead of emulating the sid 's sound, it "emulates the MOS 6510 micro processor to run the code of a SID tune and controls the cards for playing the music on a …
  • Agemixer personC64 scener, musician and coder, posting as "Agemixer/SCL" in the June 2002 Usenet debate over iseq (source: s-sidin01-iseq ) . The wiki knows him from two sides: the most detailed critic in that debate, and joint winner …
  • Aleksi Eeben personFinnish coder-musician (29 in July 2005; Southern Finland; "Sound designer by trade, employed and underpaid by a mobile phone company") who wrote two C64 music tools — the low-rastertime editor John Player and the …
  • Andreas Varga personAuthor of the sid-homepage (sidmusic.org) and the person who interviewed bob-yannes about the sid by e-mail in August 1996, with some questions contributed by King Fisher of Triad — the interview that made Yannes aware …
  • Arkanoid (Martin Galway, 1986 Imagine) songmartin-galway 's music and sound-effect program for Imagine's C64 Arkanoid — "Arkanoid / Martin Galway / 1986 Imagine" in the header of the RSID that Stefano Tognon reverse-engineered for sidin #4 (2003-06-21) — famous …
  • Asger Alstrup personAuthor of the two Examination of SID … waveform pages on Andreas Varga's sid-homepage (1995; HTML by andreas-varga ) — the earliest register-level measurements of the sid in this wiki. He read voice 3's output register …
  • Asterion Sid Tracker toolA native C64 tracker by Asterion of the group Tinnitus, version 1.0 released in 2004 on a disk with the editor and its instructions, a packer/relocator and example tunes. Everything sits on one screen (only 8 pattern …
  • Ben Daglish personC64 game composer of the 1980s and a fixture of this wiki's favourites lists — jeroen-tel puts him in his top five, chris-huelsbeck among his best authors, and JCH dissents — best remembered in the sources for The Last …
  • Bob Yannes personRobert Yannes designed the sid at MOS Technology, Commodore's chip division, in 1981–82 — and, by his own account, the commodore-64 itself — then left Commodore and co-founded the synthesizer company Ensoniq (sources: …
  • Catweasel Mk4 toolA PCI card by Individual Computers — a floppy controller for Amiga and C64 disks with a digital-joystick port — that also carries two sid sockets , so a PC can play .sid files through a real 6581 and a real 8580 and …
  • Charles Deenen personCo-founder of maniacs-of-noise with jeroen-tel , whom he met at computer meetings in Venlo (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel ) . The facts below are all second-hand, from Tel's and rob-hubbard 's interviews and …
  • CheeseCutter toolA cross-platform SID music editor in the jch-editor lineage, by Abaddon ("Timo" per scarzix 's interview; Finnish coder-musician; Damage → Fairlight 2003 → solo → triad 2012–2017): the 0-series opened JCH-editor work …
  • ChipMusic.org publicationThe chip-music community forum (chipmusic.org) whose Nintendo Handhelds and General Discussion boards hold much of the lsdj folk knowledge of the 2010s: command semantics, drum recipes, table methods, save-file swapping …
  • Chordian (Jens-Christian Huus / JCH) personJens-Christian Huus — JCH of Vibrants , author of the jch-editor and the NewPlayer family, and today the writer of chordian.net, DeepSID, and the sid-factory-ii tutorial series. The identity is his own statement: "My …
  • Chris Abbott personBritish occasional SID composer (born 1970 in Ilford, Essex) who became the C64 remix scene's publisher and promoter: C64Audio.com, the Back in Time CD series and the BIT Live concerts. By June 2003 the label had paid …
  • Chris Hülsbeck personGerman composer (born 1968-03-02 in Kassel) who wrote his own C64 driver in 1985, won 64er 's music competition with shades in 1986 and then gave the magazine soundmonitor , the editor with which the C64 tracker era …
  • Codemasters groupDavid and Richard Darling's budget label, for which matt-gray freelanced from Fruit Machine Simulator (1987) on — and "the ones who convinced me to write my own player. Back then, there was little chance of doing games …
  • Commando (C64, 1985) songrob-hubbard 's soundtrack for Elite's Commando — Newman's worked example of multiplexing on three voices. Channel 1 carries the lead melody and noise/tom hits, channel 2 the arpeggiated chord backing and ring-modulated …
  • Commodore 64 platformThe Commodore 64 is the home computer whose sid chip defines the "SID" branch of chiptune. Music is produced by a player routine that updates the SID registers from a raster interrupt every frame; trackers that run on …
  • Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide publicationThe official Commodore / Howard W. Sams manual for the commodore-64 (1982). For music its parts are chapter 4 , "Programming Sound and Music on Your Commodore 64" (pages 183–208: introduction, volume control, …
  • Commodore Zone publicationA British C64 magazine of the mid-1990s whose composer interviews the sid-homepage reprinted: jeroen-tel (June 1997, reprinted with Warren Pilkington's permission), martin-galway (issues 6 and 7, typed in by Adam …
  • Compunet groupThe British C64 online service of the mid-1980s where demos were uploaded and talent was scouted — matt-gray 's route into the games industry: "If it hadn't been for Compunet, I would probably have never left first …
  • Cybernoid (Jeroen Tel, 1988) songhewson 's 1988 shooter (C64 release 1988-03 per VGMPF) with jeroen-tel 's title music — one of the games the Hugi biography names as his best known — composed as note tables in charles-deenen 's musicfile driver …
  • Cybernoid II (Jeroen Tel, 1988) songjeroen-tel 's music for hewson 's sequel (C64, 1988-10): two songs — title and game over — in charles-deenen 's musicfile driver, "MUSICFILE V01-07-1988"; the source is public, so this is the one classic …
  • CyberTracker toolA native C64 sid tracker with a FastTracker II -like interface, by Cyberbrain (source: s-sidin13-tsm-freedom-interview ) . The wiki knows it only through user testimony in the sidin interviews of 2004–2010: easy to …
  • Dag Lem personAuthor of resid , the sid emulation engine used by vice , goattracker and the sidplay2 line of sidplay players, and the person who reverse-engineered the chip's envelope ("ADSR delay") bug. The wiki knows him only …
  • David Whittaker personBritish game composer of the 8-bit era with his own C64 driver; rob-hubbard 's favourite alongside martin-galway — "both friends" — and one of the people he was still in touch with in 1997 (source: …
  • David Whittaker's player (the Panther driver) toolThe 1986 driver of david-whittaker as reverse-engineered by dmx87 from Panther (Mastertronic): a three-voice player without an instrument table — the timbre of a voice is whatever the last command prefixes in its …
  • defMON toolfrantic 's native C64 sid music editor — in iLKke's words "the only true tracker for the C64 (as opposed to sound 'editors')": there are no instruments, no effect commands and no per-purpose tables, only one sound table …
  • Dig Dug (C64, Datasoft 1984) — the music routine songThe C64 cartridge conversion of Namco's arcade game ("copyright 1982 Namco, 1983 Atari, 1984 Datasoft"), whose music Stefano Tognon ripped into a PSID for hvsc in 2001–2002 and documented in sidin #1 with a commented …
  • DigiOrganizer toolA C64 editor and player by Polonius of the group Padua (code banner "DIGI-ORGANIZER BY POLONUS/PADUA") that adds a fourth, sampled voice to a normal single-speed tune made in any other editor: 4-bit samples packed two …
  • DMC toolDMC is a family of C64 sid music editors of the 1990s and the wiki's archetype of the duration-based school — sidin #13 frames the editor divide as duration-based (DMC) versus tracker-style (JCH) (source: …
  • Dominator (Matt Gray, 1989) songsystem-3 's shoot-'em-up (1989) with a soundtrack by matt-gray — "By the time I did Dominator for System 3, a dance-track influence was increasingly creeping into my tracks" — and the tune whose subtune 6 became the …
  • Driller (Matt Gray, 1987) songmatt-gray 's breakthrough tune for Incentive Software's 3D game (1987; the SID header says "1988 Incentive"): "They wanted something long and epic, not short and repetitive … exactly the sort of thing I had been waiting …
  • DUET toolm64's tracker: " impulse-tracker and sid-wizard on one grid — two real trackers, one clock, one save button." A complete IT engine and a complete SID-Wizard 1.97 engine in one Zig program, plus two synths of its own …
  • Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) personItalian game composer from Ferrara (31 years old in December 2004) who taught himself the SID at 15 from taped Rob Hubbard and Jeroen Tel tunes, got hired by Simulmondo at 17 on the strength of a first rockmonitor tune …
  • Frantic personC64 scener of the group Hack'n'Trade (also FTC, "Mad Frantic" to goto80 ) who composes and codes in one gesture: his two winning tiny-sid-compo entries — New Kid On The Block (2005) and the generative BLOCK ACID DUB …
  • Fred Gray personBritish C64 composer of the mid-1980s, not to be confused with matt-gray : martin-galway 's favourite after rob-hubbard — "Favourite C64 musicians: Rob Hubbard … then Fred Gray"; "Composers he liked: Rob Hubbard and …
  • Freedom (SID composer) personItalian SID composer (real name not given in the source) whose job "deals with mechanics"; first tune in 2005 in Odin Tracker on vice , since then a goattracker user, and the musician of the C64 conversion of Pushover …
  • Furnace toolFurnace is a multi-system tracker by tildearrow and contributors (GPL-2.0, github.com/tildearrow/furnace) whose manual has a page on the commodore-64 's sid and one on its C64 instrument editor; only those two pages are …
  • Future Composer (C64) toolThe scene editor of 1988 built on the first maniacs-of-noise player: "Another player cracked: Future Composer! It's released by Finnish Gold. It's the first TMC/MON player, but Finnish Gold had made an editor for it. …
  • GoatTracker toolGoatTracker 2 is "a tracker-like C64 music editor running on Win32 or Linux platforms" by lasse-oorni (Cadaver), GPL, that drives a reSID emulation ( Dag Lem 's, with Antti Lankila's distortion model) or real HardSID / …
  • Goto80 personAnders Erik Carlsson, Swedish chip musician and researcher, founder of the demoscene group Hack n' Trade — and defMON 's first user (2008) and live-improvisation champion: "I mostly improvise by typing on a keyboard. …
  • HardSID toolA family of PC cards and later USB boxes that carry real sid chips , so a PC tracker or player can drive a genuine 6581/8580 instead of an emulation. The wiki knows the line through sidin 's news pages (2003–2010) and …
  • Hawkeye (Jeroen Tel, 1988) songThe 1988 C64 game score jeroen-tel calls his first — "The first game music I wrote was composed for the game Hawkeye, at the age of 14/15" — an early maniacs-of-noise job, dated 1988-08 in VGMPF's gameography, with …
  • Helikopter Jagd (C64, 1986) songmartin-galway 's title music for Ocean's Helikopter Jagd — the tune on which he first used pulse-width sweeps, and therefore the starting point of the Galway "driver personality" built on pulse-width-modulation . …
  • Hewson Consultants groupThe British publisher that gave maniacs-of-noise its first job — Battle Valley , commissioned at the PCW show in September 1987, "our first paid gig" — and for whom jeroen-tel wrote "the music and sound for most of …
  • Hunter's Moon (Thalamus, 1987) songThalamus's 1987 shooter — "128 levels", code, graphics and sound effects by martin-walker , music by matt-gray — whose sound-effects engine Stefano Tognon reverse-engineered in sidin #14 because its effects ("the hives …
  • HVMEC — High Voltage Music Engines Collection publicationStefano Tognon's collection of the C64 music-making programs — editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits — started in 2003–04 alongside his …
  • HVSC — High Voltage SID Collection publicationThe online archive that gathers C64 music files "for replay on emulators dedicated to the singular task of reproducing C64 music and sound (to the exclusion of graphics or gameplay)" — Newman's evidence that the …
  • Iseq (Steve Judd's C64 music editor, 2002) toolStephen L. Judd's C64 music editor and player of 2002 (version "01.0 1/2002", released at www.ffd2.com/fridge/iseq on 2002-05-31 and announced on comp.sys.cbm on 2002-06-09) — deliberately not a tracker : notes run left …
  • Jan Harries (Rambones) personDanish demo-scener, C64 music ripper and composer (born 1969-01-12 in Nyborg): a founder of the demo group The Supply Team (1985–89), author of the Ripped-Off (C64, 1987–88) and Ripp Off (PlaySID, 1991–95) rip series, …
  • JCH editor & NewPlayer toolThe native C64 music editor and player family of JCH (Jens-Christian Huus, Vibrants) — the most influential of the private 1980s editors: scarzix , Drax and goto80 composed in it, laxity wrote its last player generation …
  • Jeroen Kimmel (Red) personDutch scener of The Judges who in 1986 "becomes the first scener to create his own music, in Rob Hubbard's player" — SIDwave's Red Hubbard — before the first scene-written drivers of 1987 (source: …
  • Jeroen Tel personDutch composer (born 1972-05-19 in Eindhoven, raised in Helmond — his own account, source: s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview ; alias WAVE), co-founder of maniacs-of-noise with charles-deenen and, after rob-hubbard and …
  • JITT64 (Java Ice Team Tracker) toolA cross-platform tracker for the sid written in Java by stefano-tognon (ice00), the editor of sidin , and documented by him in SIDin #13 (2010-06-28) from the user's side and from inside the player. Its distinguishing …
  • Johannes Bjerregaard personDanish game composer with his own driver — in 1986 the only "scene composer with own player" SIDwave can name — who "made commercial music for games, with his own company: Danish Music Company", handle Jozz/Upfront …
  • Johannes Bjerregaard's player toolThe driver johannes-bjerregaard wrote for himself — in 1986 the only "scene composer with own player" SIDwave can name ( s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid ) — and kept when he joined maniacs-of-noise in 1988 …
  • Jonathan Dunn personOcean Software's C64 composer of the late 1980s — the Ocean Loader tunes and game scores such as Daley Thompson '88 — whose original 1988 sources survive in the realdmx collection: "Orchestration, blood, sweat & tears …
  • Lasse Öörni (Cadaver) personAuthor of the goattracker editor ("Editor by Lasse Öörni", GPL; homepage Covert BitOps, covertbitops.c64.org, project on SourceForge) and its readme, which is the wiki's reference for the GoatTracker table model and for …
  • Last Ninja 2 (Matt Gray, 1988) songsystem-3 's 1988 sequel, scored by matt-gray as its in-house musician: a full soundtrack of loaders and level tunes written "from mid-January until early April" 1988 — "about as big a project as you would want to …
  • Laxity (Thomas E. Petersen) personDanish composer-coder who started, aged 14 in 1987, by turning rob-hubbard 's player into source: "Laxity is a little smart kid, he turns Hubbard's player into assembler source, and after having hacked some tunes in it, …
  • Linus Walleij personMember of the C64 group Triad and author of MIDIslave, "the MIDI program for C64", through which he "learned how SIDplayers worked"; he wrote "A SID player routine", pseudo-code for a MIDI-driven sid player, at the …
  • Luca Carrafiello (Luca/FIRE) personItalian Plus/4 scener and SID composer of the FIRE crew (Fantastic Italian Research Enterprise), interviewed in the first issue of sidin (September 2002) as the composer of Soulfixer — second in the SidWine online …
  • Maniacs of Noise groupThe Dutch music group founded by jeroen-tel and charles-deenen , who met "at computer meetings in Venlo"; the name was thought up by the two of them, and their first shared player routine was "our first MoN routine" ( …
  • Marcel Donné personThe third founder of maniacs-of-noise — one of the "Dutch teenagers Deenen, Tel and Marcel Donné" who started the company in 1987 — and before that, with jeroen-tel , the music half of the demo group scoop-designs …
  • Martin Galway personIn-house C64 composer at Ocean Software (born 1966-01-03; at Ocean from 1984, under contract from February 1985), with a driver whose "personality" Newman contrasts with rob-hubbard 's: Galway's routine focused on …
  • Martin Galway's player (the Ocean "macro-language" driver) toolThe 6502 music system martin-galway wrote at Ocean from 1984 ("there never was an editor … It was always assembler source files"; source: s-sidmusic-galway-interviews ), known from two reverse-engineered tunes: the …
  • Martin Walker personBritish programmer-musician of the Thalamus era: the coder, graphician and sound-effects author of hunters-moon (1987), whose table-driven SFX engine sidin #14 reverse-engineered, and a SID composer in his own right …
  • Matt Gray personBritish C64 composer (born May 1970 in Kent), in-house at system-3 for last-ninja-2 , dominator , Tusker and Vendetta , freelance for codemasters , Thalamus, Incentive ( driller ), hewson , Silverbird and Dalali; he …
  • Matt Gray's player (Driller / Dominator engine) toolThe 6502 music driver matt-gray wrote for himself from late 1986 after codemasters told him he needed one, and used for every C64 game from driller (1987) to Deliverance (1990). It is documented twice: Stefano Tognon …
  • Modules (Ivan Del Duca, 1988) songThe music of Modules , an Italian C64 game of 1988, written by its coder Ivan Del Duca in a music engine of his own — according to Stefano Tognon "probably … the first Italian music engine around". Tognon …
  • Monty on the Run (C64, 1985) songrob-hubbard 's theme for Gremlin Graphics' Monty on the Run . Newman cites it (with Crazy Comets) for the driver's signature combination of a "skydive" — a slow downward pitch fall — with an octave arpeggio; Hubbard: …
  • MUSICFILE — the Maniacs of Noise driver toolThe C64 music driver charles-deenen wrote in 1987 for maniacs-of-noise — "Deenen programmed a music driver ('Musicfile') and a sound effects driver in Turbo Ass" — into which jeroen-tel , Marcel Donné and reyn-ouwehand …
  • Nata (Stephan Parth) personItalian SID composer from Naturns (South Tyrol), 22 in January 2006, member of Samar Productions , who began composing in 2003 and works in goattracker on a PC — "Yes it's cross-composing" — with an MMC64 to hear the …
  • Ninjatracker toolA native commodore-64 music editor by lasse-oorni (Cadaver), written so that his games could have music with low rastertime and memory usage ; version 2 (2.0–2.03, dated August–September 2006 by the SIDin news; the #11 …
  • Odin Tracker toolA native C64 sid tracker, attested in the wiki from June 2002 to 2010 purely through user testimony: recommended in the same breath as goattracker during the iseq debate, called user-friendly in 2004, an inspiration for …
  • Paul Hughes's Ocean music driver (Jonathan Dunn's player) toolThe 1988 in-house music system of Ocean Software: "Oh wow (paroxism!) programming by Paul Hughes", with jonathan-dunn 's "Orchestration, blood, sweat & tears" — known from two original sources in the realdmx collection, …
  • Probe Software groupThe English developer that took jeroen-tel from maniacs-of-noise into full-time work — "i'm moving to England, because i'm working at Probe Software now" (64'er, 3/91) — and one of charles-deenen 's remembered freelance …
  • Rainbow Arts group"The first big german games developer", which hired chris-huelsbeck on the phone after shades and had him in-house from February/March 1987: great-giana-sisters (label Time Warp), Katakis , R-Type , Turrican (sources: …
  • reSID toolDag Lem 's software emulation of the sid chip — the engine inside vice , goattracker and the sidplay2 branch of the sidplay player family, and the source code in which the SID's envelope ("ADSR delay") bug is …
  • Reyn Ouwehand personDutch C64 composer who joined maniacs-of-noise by 1990-03-15 (introduced to charles-deenen by Dave Hogendorf) and "left by May 12 to join system-3 "; VGMPF dates his membership "late 1989?–1990" (source: …
  • Richard Bayliss personBritish C64 game programmer and musician, active since 1991 with SEUCK games and since 1994 with BASIC games and his own music, prolific enough in 2006 that stefano-tognon asked whether he was "the unique scener around …
  • Rob Hubbard personC64 game composer of the mid-1980s who wrote his own 6502 music driver and, with it, the sound that Newman's article treats as the template of "SID music" (source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip ) . A working …
  • Rob Hubbard's driver (the Monty on the Run player) toolThe 6502 music routine rob-hubbard wrote in 1985 and, per Anthony McSweeney's disassembly, "used (with small modifications) for his first approx. 30 tunes" — the player of monty-on-the-run , commando , Crazy Comets, …
  • Rockmonitor toolThe scene's unofficial extension of soundmonitor with a sampled drum track, made by The Dutch USA-Team in 1987: "Dutch USA-Team take Soundmonitor from Chris Hülsbeck … and adds a digi-drum routine to it, so you can edit …
  • Sanxion (C64, 1986) songrob-hubbard 's music for Thalamus' Sanxion . Newman's example of a noise transient on a pitched instrument : channel 3's pulse-wave bass "is augmented with digital noise in its attack", so a 16th-note bassline "appears …
  • Scarzix (Carsten Berggreen) personSID composer and 6510 coder, born 1972, active around 1989–90 in the jch-editor ( CombatZone , Galactix for Triangle) and again from 2013 in Offence, where he became the public face of the cheesecutter editor — its …
  • Scoop Designs groupThe Dutch C64 demo group that maniacs-of-noise grew out of: C=Lehti's 1989 profile calls SCOOP known for demos polished and planned to the last detail, with charles-deenen coding the top ones and jeroen-tel and Marcel …
  • Shades (Chris Hülsbeck, 1986) songchris-huelsbeck 's first published tune: written in February 1986 "from 8 PM to 4 AM" for 64er 's music competition, "merely aiming for top ten", and placed first, earning 1500 DM (source: s-vgmpf-chris-huelsbeck ) .
  • SID (MOS 6581 / 8580) chipThe SID — Sound Interface Device — is the sound chip of the commodore-64 : three voices, each with its own waveform, pulse width and adsr-envelope , plus one shared programmable filter; designed by bob-yannes at MOS …
  • SID Factory II toolA sid music editor documented here through chordian 's tutorial. Its data model is the familiar one — instruments as byte rows, a wave table , a pulse table and a filter table, sequences in tracks with +++ (gate held) …
  • SID file format (.sid) formatThe distribution format for commodore-64 music: the tune's data plus its player routine, with metadata, playable in SID players and emulators. sid-wizard 's SID-Maker exports it; the author-info field uses : as …
  • SID-Wizard toolSID-Wizard is a music tracker that runs on the commodore-64 itself and drives the sid chip. Written by hermit (Mihaly Horvath); version 1.8 is from 2018. It borrows the GoatTracker-like concept and keys and ideas from …
  • SID-Wizard module format (.swm family) formatThe native file family of sid-wizard : the .swm work module and its 2/3/4- SID siblings .sws / .swt / .swq , plus the .swi single-instrument file. The byte-exact layout below is from m64's duet research into Hermit's SW …
  • sid-wizard-vessel toolm64's (Mario 64 / MARiO64) fork of sid-wizard 1.8.7 for anarkiwi's Vessel MIDI interface: external MIDI tempo sync IN plus a live-act feature set — free repositioning in the orderlist during synced playback, pattern …
  • siddump toolA command-line utility that runs a .sid file ( sid-format ) in a small 6502 emulation and prints, frame by frame, what the tune writes to the sid registers — the tool C64 musicians use to see how an instrument is built …
  • SIDId toolLasse Öörni's player-identification tool: sidid.cfg holds byte-pattern signatures for about 1 300 named C64 players and editors, and sidid.nfo a note per entry with author, release year and a CSDb reference — which is …
  • SIDin (e-zine) publicationstefano-tognon 's (ice00) free PDF magazine about "the SID chip from the inside": fifteen issues between September 2002 and 2015-10-31, each with a news section on players, editors and hardware, an interview with a SID …
  • SIDPLAY toolThe family of SID-music players that grew out of the Amiga's PlaySID: Michael Schwendt's SIDPLAY for the PC, the libsidplay/libsidplay2 libraries and their front-ends (Sidplay2/w on Windows, XSIDPLAY on Unix, SIDPLAY …
  • Soundmonitor toolchris-huelsbeck 's music editor for the C64, written in the summer of 1986 as a front end for his Musicmaster play routine and published by 64er as a type-in "Listing des Monats" in issue 10/1986 — "the most popular …
  • Stefano Tognon (ice00) personItalian programmer, editor and sole regular author of the free SID e-zine sidin (2002–2015), and author of the Java tracker jitt64 — the "Java Ice Team Tracker", hence the "Ice Team" in the name and the handle ice00 …
  • Stephan Schmid (Steppe) personGerman C64 scener (Erlangen; 28 in 2003), webmaster of the Demodungeon site and a member of the hvsc crew from October 2002, who rips the tunes of the demos he documents; as a composer he was active for three weeks in …
  • SwinSID toolA hardware sound module that sits in the commodore-64 's SID socket in place of a real 6581/8580 — announced in early 2006 as a wavetable synthesizer with "almost full" sid compatibility, and present in the wiki's later …
  • System 3 groupMark Cale's London developer of the Last Ninja games; matt-gray was its exclusive musician from November 1987 to about March 1989 ( last-ninja-2 , dominator , Tusker , Vendetta ), after which "the Maniacs of Noise had …
  • TFMX toolchris-huelsbeck 's second-generation driver, born on the C64 in the summer of 1988 and carried to the Amiga (and later DOS, SNES and the N64's MusyX): instead of only "the typical rigid instrument table" it runs "a …
  • The Great Giana Sisters (C64, 1987/88) songrainbow-arts ' platform game (label Time Warp, released 1988-01) whose soundtrack made chris-huelsbeck 's name: seven songs and fifteen sound effects composed in soundmonitor and converted to his private The Final …
  • The SID Homepage (sidmusic.org) publicationandreas-varga 's 1990s website about the sid — the place where the designer of the chip, bob-yannes , first learned that programs like SIDPLAY and PlaySID existed ("I only recently became aware of them (through your …
  • Tim Follin personGame composer whose C64 work — above all Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Bionic Commando — the wiki's interviews treat as canon: when scarzix asked a Facebook sceners' group in 2013 to rate his old tunes 0–10, the scale was "where …
  • Tiny Sid Compo eventAn online competition for complete SID tunes — player and music — in 256 or 512 bytes , run by stefano-tognon (ice00) of sidin from 15 January to 8 May 2005, with the entries' sources printed and commented in SIDin #8 …
  • TSM (Carmine Migliaccio) personItalian SID composer from Naples (born about 1980; "30 years ago" in 2010), a former programmer who made his first serious C64 music around 2003 and composed the title tune of the C64 conversion of Pushover ; "I don't …
  • Turbo Assembler (C64) toolThe native C64 assembler that served maniacs-of-noise as its music editor: "The editor for both of us was easy: Turbo Assembler :)" — charles-deenen wrote the musicfile driver and SFX driver in it, and jeroen-tel , …
  • VICE toolThe commodore-64 emulator the sid-wizard manual assumes when running the tracker on a PC. Key equivalents given by the manual: C64 CONTROL = Tab, RUN/STOP = Esc, C= (Commodore key) = Control, ← (back-arrow) = Tilde or …
  • WitchMaster (Mikael Norrgård) personAuthor of the e-book Creating Chiptunes with SID-Wizard (first edition 2012 on CSDb, second edition 2014-02-11 co-credited to hermit ), written because the official manual left out "some stuff … that SID gurus know but …