Home › browse › tag

#c64

tag 253 pages

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 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 …
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 …
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: …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 . …
Hermit (Mihaly Horvath) personHungarian C64 developer, author of sid-wizard and its add-ons (SID-Maker, SWMconvert, sng2swm), and of the SID-Wizard user manual (1.8 edition dated 2018). Website: hermit.sidrip.com (source: s-sid-wizard-manual ) .
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 …
Quantam Porcupine (Joshua Shagam) personPianist, coder and scream-tracker-3 tracker from New Mexico who started on Music Construction Set on the commodore-64 , and who prefers songs "optimized for as few channels as possible". Spelled "Quantam" in traxweekly …
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 …
64'er 10/1986 — Musik wie noch nie: the Soundmonitor article and manual summaryThe article with which 64er published chris-huelsbeck 's soundmonitor as its "Listing des Monats" (listing of the month) in October 1986 — the editor that started the C64 tracker era and the first documentation of his …
64'er 2/88 — Von der Spielidee ins Regal (Rainbow Arts, with Hülsbeck) summary64'er visits rainbow-arts in Gütersloh to trace how a game is made — and sound comes last in the pipeline. Hülsbeck's segment is a four-question mini-interview taken while great-giana-sisters was new and To Be On Top …
Arcade Attack — Matt Gray (VGM Maestro) interview (2020/2021) summaryA short late interview with matt-gray : the Last Ninja 2 brief in one sentence, the NES port of his player, and the three Reformation albums.
Asger Alstrup — Examination of SID triangle waveform / noise waveform (The SID Homepage, 1995) summaryTwo pages of measurements from andreas-varga 's SID Homepage ( sid-homepage ). asger-alstrup read voice 3's waveform output register $D41B on a real C64 once per clock cycle — a REU (RAM Expansion Unit) DMA transfer of …
Brief introduction to Super Commands (FTC) summaryfrantic 's own introduction to defmon 's "less known" batch-editing mode: Super Commands multiply any ordinary edit keystroke over many steps, many repetitions, every Nth line, or all sequences at once — defMON's …
C64 Programmer's Reference Guide, ch. 4 — Programming Sound and Music on Your Commodore 64 (1982) summaryThe official 1982 introduction to the sid from the BASIC programmer's side: ten example programs that POKE the chip's registers, each with a line-by-line explanation, plus a short "technical explanation" of frequency, …
C64.COM interview #36: Matt Gray (2014) summaryThe most technical of matt-gray 's interviews: how his player was organised, what made its vibrato "his", which games he did in which year and how long each took, and the Compunet-to-System 3 career path.
C64.COM interview #8 — Charles Deenen (2010) summarycharles-deenen 's own long-form C64 Q&A: the fullest first-hand list of what he actually did per game — and it is mostly sound effects , with music on a shorter list. Introduces himself as "co-founder of Maniacs of …
C=Lehti 4/89 — SIDin hollantilaiset valjastajat (Maniacs of Noise) summaryThe only contemporary (1989) profile of maniacs-of-noise in this wiki — written by Jori Olkkonen while Tel was 16 and Deenen 19, with details no retrospective interview repeats: the driver's version number, a …
Charles Deenen interviews: Domination #11 (1998) and Designing Sound (2010) summarycharles-deenen in his own words — the programmer half of maniacs-of-noise on the driver, the tool and the money, and later the sound designer looking back at how it started.
Charts and Tables for SID-Wizard 1.6 (document version 1.0, 2014) summaryA fifteen-page cheat sheet for SID-Wizard 1.6: one page per screen or table with the value schemes, then key tables that list every C64 key next to its vice equivalent, and four reference tables (decimal ↔ signed ↔ hex, …
CheeseCutter — the repo, the man pages, and the release paper trail (2011–2026) summarycheesecutter carries almost no documentation of its own — the repo's AUTHORS and NEWS are empty, ChangeLog and doc/README just point to theyamo.kapsi.fi/ccutter ("for instructions on program use"), and that site has …
chipmusic.org — C64 Music for Dummies (ant1's SID-Wizard 1.0 tutorial, 2012) summaryA forum tutorial that takes a complete beginner from starting sid-wizard 1.0 (released 2012, on SourceForge) to an exported .sid , by making three instruments, a pattern, an orderlist and a SID-Maker export; updated the …
chipmusic.org — CheeseCutter video tutorial thread (2014) summaryA short thread announcing scarzix 's video tutorial series for cheesecutter — the series the SIDin #14 interview mentions ( s-sidin14-scarzix-interview ). Its main value: the complete list of four tutorials (the scout …
chipmusic.org — sid music hints'n'tips (2013) summary4mat opens by pointing at a CSDb thread of SID tips "with contributions from Jammer, Jeff and many others" (link not preserved) and at "a really good article" on the waveform differences between 6581 and 8580 (link not …
chipmusic.org — the defMON megathread (2014–2026) summaryThe de-facto support forum, changelog and design diary for defMON , run for twelve years by its author frantic himself. He opens on 2014-06-08 ("If you are one of those people who tried it out and actually did …
chipmusic.org — What are the typical C64/SID sounds/instruments? (2015) summaryA keyboard player joining a video-game cover band (in the vein of Press Play on Tape or Machinae Supremacy) asks which sounds make a SID tune sound like a SID tune, and how to fake them on a rompler (Yamaha MOXF6, Korg …
Chordian — SID Musicians (JCH's verdicts on the game composers, 2018) summarychordian — a coder-composer who wrote his own editor in the 1980s — rates the famous game composers "absolutely not overrated" or "indeed very overrated", judging instruments and player as much as tunes. Opinion, but …
commodore-64.eu — The C64 SID Chip (6581 vs 8580 overview) summaryAn accessible, unsigned overview of the sid for a general audience. It is a secondary source : nothing on it carries a reference, and the page sells things. The wiki uses it only to confirm or annotate claims that …
Composing in SID Factory II, Part 4 — Instruments (Chordian) summaryA tutorial blog post by chordian on making instruments in sid-factory-ii : what the ADSR bytes do, why hard restart exists, the four waveforms and their combinations on old and new chips, the noise lock-up and the test …
Creating Chiptunes with SID-Wizard, Second Edition (summary) summaryA 75-page e-book (document version 1.0, 11 February 2014, written for sid-wizard 1.6) by witchmaster with chapters by hermit taken from the 1.2/1.4 manuals. Its stated purpose: explain "some stuff left out that SID …
CSDb forum: Huelsbeck TFMX? (2006) summaryA short thread that settles what the scene knows about the C64 tfmx editor: nothing of it ever circulated.
CSDb release pages: Soundmonitor V1.0 (1986) and Shades (1986) summaryThe database entries for the program and the tune, useful for downloads, dating and the scene's own view of them.
Cybernoid I / Cybernoid II 'behind the notes' videos (2014) and the Lemon64 thread summaryTwo short YouTube videos that play jeroen-tel 's cybernoid and cybernoid-ii against the Turbo Assembler source they were typed into, and the forum thread that explains what is (and is not) being shown. The videos …
defMON wiki — DIN/MIDI/LSDj/Nanoloop sync, stereo SID, manual BPM tables summaryThe defmon wiki's hardware pages: Scannerboy's user-port sync adapter (with the assembly code to drive it from your own programs), the 2SID stereo feature set, and frantic 's defBPM calculator/tables (2013-03-02) that …
defMON wiki — features, interface overview, seqED key map summaryThe unofficial documentation of defmon , frantic 's C64 sid music editor, from the wiki mirror at defmon.vandervecken.com ("There is no official support for the program, but on this wiki you will find some bits and …
defMON wiki — release history 2008–2020, creations, links summaryThe dated release list of defmon with frantic 's named releases and per-release notes, plus the wiki's list of music and demos made with the program. Version numbers "are essentially just date stamps that reflect the …
defMON wiki — using a defMON tune in your own program summaryThe defmon wiki's developer pages: how to link a packed defMON tune into an assembly project, the init/play/update entry points (including the multispeed split), and the self-modifying global-volume location. "The …
defMONing 101: A defMON Operator Field Guide (iLKke, 2013) summaryA compact survival guide to defmon by iLKke, "the result of my limited defMON knowledge based largely on experimentation… not intended as an exhaustive explanation of the program, but rather a brief survival guide and …
defMONing 102: extended field guide (iLKke et al.) summaryThe extended, multi-author revision of iLKke's defMONing 101 for defmon — same reference core, plus precise timing semantics (fraMES), the full speed/timer key set, Super Commands, and long practical sections on the …
Domination #1 — Interview with Jeroen Tel (Jazzcat, 1994) summaryThe earliest of the wiki's long Tel interviews — jeroen-tel at 22, still mid-career, walking through the whole C64 road from BASIC player to Probe Software and the Nintendo CD.
DUET research: SID-Wizard 1.97 formats and player (summary) summarym64's engineering research (session 2026-08-01) for duet 's pure-Zig reimplementation of the sid-wizard 1.97 player: byte-exact .swi / .swm format specs validated against 324/324 example instruments and 143/143 SW 1.97 …
DUET research: SID-Wizard player.asm deep dive (summary) summarym64's implementation-grade appendix to s-duet-research-sidwizard : three exhaustive extraction passes over sid-wizard 1.97's player.asm (4062 lines, 64tass), with 6502-exact pseudocode including carry and flag …
electro·pizza — defMON, VICE, and the Pocket CHIP (2019) summaryA 2019-07-29 blog post by Ryan Oles documenting, step by step, how he set up vice on a Pocket CHIP (a small Debian-based handheld with a keyboard) to practice defmon without dedicating desk space to a real commodore-64 …
Furnace tracker — C64 (SID) system and instrument documentation summaryTwo pages of the manual of furnace , a multi-system tracker (GPL-2.0 repository), describing how it drives the sid . Furnace is not one of this wiki's focus tools; the pages are kept as a second, independent description …
Game Audio Network Guild — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011) summaryA career-summary interview for the game-audio trade guild; little technique, but Hülsbeck's own one-sentence version of the Soundmonitor story and of his self-taught, tools-first approach.
GamesArt interview — Jeroen Tel (2015) summaryThe Tel Me More-era interview: why he crowdfunded remakes of his 1987–1991 C64 work, where the funk in his basslines comes from, and his first game credit named — Hawkeye .
GitHub realdmx/c64_6581_sid_players — Cybernoid II in Deenen's MUSICFILE, the MoN SFX player, the Driller listing summaryA GitHub collection of "original and reverse-engineered music players for the C64", converted to the ACME assembler so that "every assembly file should produce a .sid file". Its Tel_Jeroen_MON/Tel_Jeroen_Cybernoid2.asm …
GoatTracker v2.72 readme (summary) summaryThe manual of goattracker 2 by lasse-oorni — "a tracker-like C64 music editor running on Win32 or Linux platforms" with reSID emulation (Dag Lem; distortion model by Antti Lankila) or HardSID hardware, distributed under …
goto80.com — defMON posts and the Improv page summaryThree short blog posts (2009–2020) and the undated Improv page from goto80 's own site — first-hand statements on defmon 's authorship, its evolution as a live instrument, and his from-scratch improvisation practice on …
Happy Computer 3/87 — Der Soundprofessor (Hülsbeck at work) summaryA reporter takes the 6:35 Intercity from Munich to visit the 18-year-old chris-huelsbeck in Langen — the earliest eyewitness account of his workplace in this wiki, published the month he joined rainbow-arts .
Hugi #38 — Up Close & Personal: Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise (2014) summaryMagic of Nah-Kolor's interview with jeroen-tel for the diskmag Hugi, early 2014: biography, what rob-hubbard and martin-galway meant to him, his working methods in 2014, the state of maniacs-of-noise , and his live …
HVSC — SID file format description (PSID v1–v4, RSID) summaryThe reference description of .sid files as used by the High Voltage SID Collection: a big-endian header (magic, version, offsets, addresses, song count, speed bits, three 32-byte strings, and from v2 on flags for clock …
IMR interview — Chris Hülsbeck (1996) summaryA short questionnaire with one big claim: Hülsbeck believes he beat martin-galway to sampled sound on the sid — and lost the fame to a release delay.
IMR interview — Jeroen Tel (1996) summaryThe scene-questionnaire Tel: aliases, group chronology and his own theory of why his music mattered. Settles his birthplace : "I was born on the 19th of May 1972 in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I have lived in Helmond …
Lemon64 threads: SID and ADSR re-triggering? (2008) / Hard restart – what's the story? (2015) summaryTwo short Lemon64 forum threads that between them give the practical understanding of the sid envelope problem behind hard-restart . In the first (2008, 4 posts) a game coder cannot retrigger a sound effect; lasse-oorni …
Lemon64: How does one learn SID sound design these days? (2020) summaryA returning C64 user with an Ultimate64 has found sid-wizard ("reminds me of ScreamTreacker/ImpulseTracker in terms of composition") but cannot turn what he knows about subtractive synthesis into instrument values — the …
Lemon64: SID-Wizard instrument recommendations? (2021) summaryA thin thread. The opening question — do you use, tweak or make sid-wizard 's example instruments, and what are your tips? — got no answer at all; the only instrument in it, a bass drum, was posted as an image that the …
little-scale — Syncing something *to* LSDJ, and the un-sync piece (2006–2008) summaryEvery other post in this series makes the Game Boy a slave. These two make it the master clock for the rest of the studio — and the third, from 2006, throws the clock away entirely.
Matt Gray's Dominator subtune 6 source (PLAYER V4.2, 1987) and the Reformation driver competition summaryThe only C64 driver in the wiki published by its author: matt-gray 's own 6502 source for one dominator subtune, released under Creative Commons on 2014-11-26 as a gift to SID composers and the basis of a composing …
MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) datasheet — the text behind Appendix O summaryThe manufacturer's twelve-page specification of the sid : block description, the 29-register map, a paragraph per register bit, the envelope rate table, the filter, pins and electrical data, the note table with a …
My Computer Chronicles — Jens-Christian Huus / JCH (2017) summaryJens-Christian Huus — JCH of Vibrants , today the wiki's chordian — tells his whole computing life from 1983 to 2000: how a Danish postman with no musical education built the C64 music editor "that has since inspired …
Newman — Driving the SID chip: Assembly Language, Composition, and Sound Design for the C64 (2017) summaryAn academic article arguing that the C64's sound is as much the product of the composers' bespoke player routines ("drivers") as of the sid itself: rob-hubbard and martin-galway wrote their own 6502 drivers, and the …
Old C64/PC Player/Editor Notes — Chordian (2017) summaryWhile compiling his memoir ( s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles ), chordian scanned the paper notes he kept in the 1980s and 90s for his C64 and PC music players and editors, and published them in five captioned …
realdmx: Charles Deenen's two test tunes — an undated MUSICFILE build and the 'Scoop designs' Maniacs of Noise player summaryTwo of charles-deenen 's own sources in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). Test Tune is the musicfile code base — the same routines, labels and table formats as the Cybernoid II file, in a slightly …
realdmx: Johannes Bjerregaard's own player — the James Bond 3 demo (a Maniacs of Noise commission) and Myth summaryTwo of johannes-bjerregaard 's own Turbo Assembler sources from 1989, in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) under Bjerregaard_Johannes_MON — but the player is his, not charles-deenen 's musicfile : nothing …
realdmx: Jonathan Dunn's Daley Thompson '88 and Ocean Loader 5 in Paul Hughes's Ocean music driver summaryTwo original Ocean Software sources from 1988 — not reverse-engineered — in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ): the Daley Thompson '88 soundtrack (six tunes) and the loader tune HVSC calls Ocean Loader 5 , …
realdmx: Martin Galway's Arkanoid — Tognon's SIDin #4 reverse-engineering, with the 'sample' synthesis through $D418 summaryThe full Arkanoid (Imagine, 1986) music and sound-effect program of martin-galway , reverse-engineered by Stefano Tognon for sidin #4 and converted to ACME by dmx87 ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). It is the later, larger …
realdmx: Martin Galway's Rambo II loader — the macro-language player, reverse-engineered by dmx87 summaryThe loader tune of Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1986) — matt-gray 's "favourite C64 tune of all time" ( s-c64com-matt-gray-interview ) — in martin-galway 's own player, reverse-engineered by dmx87 for the realdmx …
realdmx: Reyn Ouwehand's Armada (MUSICFILE, 'Special version for Reyn Ouwehand', 1989) and Dutch Breeze (the 1990 MoN player) summaryTwo original Turbo Assembler sources of reyn-ouwehand 's in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ). Armada (1989) is charles-deenen 's musicfile — the Cybernoid II code with a longer banner: "Scoop Designs …
realdmx: Rob Hubbard's driver — McSweeney's Monty on the Run disassembly and the Commando title summaryTwo files from the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) hold the 6502 driver rob-hubbard used, per the header, "(with small modifications) for his first approx. 30 tunes": Anthony McSweeney's commented …
realdmx: three smaller drivers — Fred Gray's Mutants (song as code), Jeroen Kimmel's 'Red's music player' (1989) and David Whittaker's Panther driver summaryThe remaining three players of the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ), each a different answer to the same problem. fred-gray 's Mutants is not a sequencer at all but a song written as code — 26 hand-written …
realdmx: two scene players with their own sources — Francois Prijt's Audial Arts 'zong player' v1/v2 (1991) and Adam Bulka's FAME 'Sound Routine f 4.1.0' (1988) summaryThree original Turbo Assembler sources in the realdmx collection ( s-realdmx-sid-players ) from the demoscene rather than the games industry: Francois Prijt's "zong player" for the Dutch group Audial Arts (two versions, …
Remix64 — An Interview with Anders Carlsson aka GOTO80 (Neil Carr, 2002) summaryNeil Carr interviews goto80 (Anders Carlsson, born 1981, Swedish) for Remix64 on 2002-09-18 — early in his career, just after moving to Gothenburg. The intro frames him as a maker of "rather funky and experimental SID …
Remix64 — An Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2001) summaryNeil Carr's 2001 interview with chris-huelsbeck for the remix community: why he started on the C64, what shades did for him, what he loves and dislikes about the sid , and how composing changed once real instruments …
Remix64 — An Interview with Martin Galway (Neil Carr, 2001) summaryNeil Carr's e-mail interview with martin-galway for the remix community site Remix64, dated 2001-03-28, when Galway was Audio Lead on Freelancer at Microsoft's Magic Anvil studio. Mostly about taste, remixes and career, …
Remix64 — Last Ninja 2 vs Ninja Remix: what's the deal? (Chris Abbott) summaryWhy the cartridge re-release of last-ninja-2 has a completely different soundtrack — a one-page case study in the practical meaning of "a game has one music driver".
Retro Gamesmaster — Matt Gray Interview (Peter Ward) summaryThe interview with the most complete game-by-game commentary from matt-gray — dates, fees, what was cut — and his one-paragraph description of the C64 workflow.
Retrogaming Planet / EmuWiki — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011) summaryThe interview in which chris-huelsbeck describes his actual C64 workflow — two machines, soundmonitor then TFMX Editor, hex numbers shown as A-2 / G#3 — and the idea behind tfmx 's per-note script.
RVG Interviews: Matt Gray (2016) summaryA forum-sourced interview whose value is one answer on technique: matt-gray on the "note or chord plex", pulse-width sweeps on chords, drums by waveform switching, and the fact that "even putting a vibrato on a sound …
SID-Wizard 1.8 User Manual (summary) summaryThe short TXT edition of the user manual shipped with sid-wizard 1.8 (2018), written by hermit . It is readable on a real commodore-64 and covers: an introduction to SID-Wizard and the sid chip's registers, usage …
sid-wizard-vessel README — MIDI sync IN and live-act features for SID-Wizard summaryThe README of m64's fork of sid-wizard 1.8.7 for the Vessel MIDI interface : "A SID-Wizard version for the Vessel MIDI interface, with features for using in a live act" — external MIDI tempo sync IN , free movement in …
SIDId (cadaver/sidid): the player-signature list and its notes summaryThe tool HVSC and DeepSID use to say which player a SID file runs in. Its config is a list of byte patterns per player name; its .nfo is a terse who-wrote-what with release years and CSDb links — the most compact …
SIDin #1 — Iseq music composition program: the comp.sys.cbm threads and Steve Judd's Commando cover (2002) summaryTognon reprints the June 2002 comp.sys.cbm/alt.c64 argument over Steve Judd's iseq — "a new kind of music player for the C64", "very different respect all the other players around" — and then Judd's own cover of …
SIDin #1 — Luca Carrafiello (Luca/FIRE) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryThe first interview of sidin : Stefano Tognon asks the Italian Plus/4 scener and SID composer luca-carrafiello how someone without a SID chip came to write SID music — through converted Plus/4 editors, a SIDcard and a …
SIDin #1 — Ripping a game: Dig Dug (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryTognon's walkthrough of turning a 1984 cartridge game into a PSID the hard way — "disassemble the game and give a source for the rip" — followed by his commented source of the Dig Dug music routine, an interpreter of …
SIDin #10 — Goattracker 2: a cover in the table-based GT2 (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's look at goattracker 2 in mid-2006 — "now tables based and so it can compete with the best C64 music tools available" — done by making a cover of Haddaway's What is Love in it, from a MIDI file, on Linux. A …
SIDin #10 — Richard Bayliss interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summarystefano-tognon interviews richard-bayliss , the prolific British C64 game-maker and musician ("maybe you are the unique scener around today that can release a game a week?"), in July 2006 for sidin . The useful part for …
SIDin #10 — Tiny Sid 2, part 1: XL5, Mini Digi Drum, RM, Miniature Rhapsody (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryFour entries of the Tiny Sid 2 compo (2006) — two of 256 bytes, two of 512 — with full source and Tognon's analysis: how a whole tune, player and note table fit into one disk block ( tiny-sid-compo , sid-player-routine …
SIDin #11 — Laxity interview (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summarylaxity (Thomas Egeskov Petersen) of Vibrants and maniacs-of-noise , "a old composer … He recently started to compose again with sid", interviewed by mail in January 2007 — about the ten C64 sound drivers he has written, …
SIDin #11 — SID Factory vs Ninjatracker (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summaryTwo native C64 editors "released about the same day": laxity 's SID Factory (the 2007 ancestor of sid-factory-ii ) and lasse-oorni 's ninjatracker V2 . Tognon documents the data formats of both — the SID Factory …
SIDin #11 — Tiny Sid 2, part 2: BLOCK ACID DUB and Resolution (Stefano Tognon, 2007) summaryTwo more Tiny Sid 2 entries ( tiny-sid-compo ), the sequel to s-sidin10-tiny-sid-2-part-1 : Frantic's 256-byte BLOCK ACID DUB , a generative dub tune whose player treats notes and instruments as one stream of SID …
SIDin #12 — Mihály Horváth (Hermit) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryhermit four years before sid-wizard : Tognon interviews him about "a tracker that can control 3 sid chips", written on a real commodore-64 between January and May 2008. The interview gives his real name, age and job, …
SIDin #12 — Ripping Trivia Arcade (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryA worked example of turning game music into a .sid file when the player does not follow the init/play convention: the music of The Trivia Arcade sits in a separate file, has three entry points, and runs four times per …
SIDin #12 — Tiny Sid 2, part 3: Plaster (512 b) and Back To Basics (256 b) (Stefano Tognon, 2008) summaryThe end of Tognon's series on the Tiny Sid Compo II : the two remaining entries, GRG's 512-byte Plaster — "the tune that take more points over all the others" — and Jaymz Julian's 256-byte Back To Basics , both "done by …
SIDin #13 — Inside JITT64: the player routine (Stefano Tognon, 2010) summaryThe player behind jitt64 , explained by its author with the source: how init and the IRQ routine are organised (and why the SID is written at the start of the interrupt), how a pattern row is decoded into command bits, …
SIDin #13 — JITT64 Tracker: Tognon's Java Ice Team Tracker from the user's side (2010) summarystefano-tognon documents his own jitt64 (Java Ice Team Tracker), "my C64 cross-platform music tracker … written in Java for being portable", from the user's side: screen layout, the track commands, the 16 pattern …
SIDin #13 — TSM & Freedom interview (Stefano Tognon, 2010) summaryTwo Italian SID composers who wrote music for the (then unreleased) C64 conversion of the Amiga game Pushover , questioned in parallel: how they came to the SID, why both ended up in goattracker , what they think of …
SIDin #14 — Inside Hunter's Moon (Martin Walker's sound-effects engine, reverse-engineered, 2015) summaryTognon reverse-engineers the sound-effects engine of hunters-moon (Thalamus, 1987) — code, graphics and effects by Martin Walker, music by matt-gray — because "the hives seems to be true living": the most realistic game …
SIDin #14 — Inside Matt Gray's Dominator player (Tognon's commented PLAYER V4.2 and the musician's guide to composing in it, 2015) summaryWritten for the Reformation driver competition ( s-matt-gray-dominator-source ): Tognon takes matt-gray 's released dom6-public.asm , comments every line, explains 64tass syntax to non-programmers, walks through the …
SIDin #14 — Scarzix interview (Carsten Berggreen: JCH's editor, CombatZone, the return with CheeseCutter, 2015) summaryTognon interviews scarzix (Carsten Berggreen), a composer of the 1989–90 JCH-editor generation who came back in 2013, joined Offence, and made himself the public voice of the cheesecutter editor — the interview is the …
SIDin #15 — Inside Matt Gray's Serpent Demo player (the 4-bit sample voice, reverse-engineered, 2015) summaryAnswering Gray's remark in the same issue that the Serpent Demo drums were "too loud" ( s-sidin15-matt-gray-interview ), Tognon reverse-engineers the tune's player: the Driller -generation matt-gray-player plus a …
SIDin #15 — Matt Gray interview (technical questions during Reformation, 2015) summaryThe most technical of the matt-gray interviews: why his tunes are tuned to A4 ≈ 424 Hz, when he started using filters, how the matt-gray-player took shape and what he borrowed from Hubbard, the Serpent Demo samples, and …
SIDin #1–15 — Editorials and News digest (Stefano Tognon, 2002–2015) summaryThe News section of every sidin issue reported the releases of the SID scene "from an issue to another": editors, players, emulation libraries, hardware, competitions and collections. This page condenses all fifteen …
SIDin #2 — David Whittaker's Lazy Jones music routine (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryTognon's reverse-engineering of the hvsc rip of Lazy Jones (Terminal Software, 1984) — david-whittaker 's earliest routine in the wiki and, in his words, "the most simple I had seen until now": two voices of raw …
SIDin #2 — Lasse Öörni (Cadaver) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryA short e-mail interview with lasse-oorni made in November 2002 — the year goattracker was new — in which he explains why he kept writing players (memory and rastertime), why GoatTracker's music "takes too much memory", …
SIDin #2 — Matt Gray's Driller music routine (Stefano Tognon, 2002) summaryStefano Tognon's reverse-engineering of the driller player, published in his free SID e-zine sidin in 2002 — the documentation of the matt-gray-player as it was in 1987: song/track/pattern structure, the pattern command …
SIDin #3 — Music Engine pattern searching, part 1 (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow to tell which music routine a .sid was made with: scan the file for a byte sequence that only that engine's code contains. Tognon gives the method (with source: pick characteristic code; without: compare …
SIDin #3 — Ripping BASIC based tune: Sheba and Testcard (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow Tognon turned two BASIC programs from Commodore's Introduction to BASIC course — Andrew Colin's The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (part 2, Appendix A) and the Testcard demo (part 1) — into PSID files. A BASIC-driven …
SIDin #3 — Stephan Schmid (Steppe) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryThe sidin interview with stephan-schmid — Steppe, webmaster of the Demodungeon and since October 2002 a member of the hvsc crew: three weeks of Soundmonitor in 1991, what an HVSC crew member actually does all day, a …
SIDin #4 — Chris Abbott interview (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryAn email interview with chris-abbott — occasional SID composer, but above all the man behind C64Audio.com, the Back in Time CDs and the BIT Live concerts — done for sidin #4 in June 2003. Biography, the economics of the …
SIDin #4 — Martin Galway's Arkanoid music routine, the explanation (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryTognon's prose around his reverse-engineering of arkanoid — the explanation of the galway-player that the code alone does not give: why he picked this tune, what he thinks of the code, which instructions exist on which …
SIDin #4 — Ripping a BASIC program into RSID: Telengard (Stefano Tognon, 2003) summaryHow Stefano Tognon turned a BASIC-only rip of Telengard (Avalon Hill, 1983) — a text adventure whose sound is written entirely in BASIC, without interrupts — into machine code a SID player can run: every BASIC statement …
SIDin #5 — Chris Huelsbeck interview (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryA short e-mail interview with chris-huelsbeck whose one long answer is the most precise account he has given of his C64 drivers: Soundmonitor built on his third player, then TFM and a sample revision, then tfmx — and …
SIDin #5 — High Voltage Music Engines Collection (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon announces hvmec , his collection of the C64 music-making programs themselves — editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits — as a companion to hvsc and …
SIDin #5 — Music Engines Pattern Searching, part 2: the Lostack database (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryThe format of Lada 'Ray' Lostak's database of about 450 C64 music engines: Player blocks of Name , 3–16 ID=offset:value pairs, optional Message s and the addresses where the player keeps its track and pattern positions …
SIDin #6 — Asterion Sid Tracker v1.0 reviewed (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon's walkthrough of a native C64 tracker released in 2004 by Asterion of the group Tinnitus: a one-screen editor whose instrument lives in a 13-parameter sound table with independent wave and arpeggio macros, whose …
SIDin #6 — Inside DigiOrganizer, Polonius's 4-bit sample editor (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryTognon's manual-plus-disassembly of digiorganizer , "a great peaces of software wrote by Polonius of Padua for making 4bit sample music using SID volume register": an editor that adds a fourth, sampled voice — drums, …
SIDin #6 — Jan Diabelez Arnt Harries (Rambones) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2004) summaryAn interview with jan-harries — Danish demo-scener (The Supply Team), Soundmonitor composer "Rambones", the ripper behind the Ripped-Off series and a founding member of the hvsc team — made in February 2004 for Stefano …
SIDin #7 — Dustbin (Stefano Palmonari) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryAn interview with dustbin , the Italian composer who wrote game music for Simulmondo in the early 1990s on C64, Amiga, PC and Game Boy without formal musical training — on learning the SID from taped Hubbard and Tel …
SIDin #7 — Inside Modules: Ivan Del Duca's music engine (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon's reverse-engineering of the music engine of Modules , an Italian C64 game of 1988 whose coder, Ivan Del Duca, "probably wrote the first Italian music engine around, instead of used the one's that were available" …
SIDin #7 — xxlarge: Ninja's 256-byte cover of 'X large' analysed (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryxxlarge is a C64 tune by Ninja/theDream that fits in less than 256 bytes — player, tables and music — and is a cover of Jeff's "X large", "played a little slower that the original", whose own data is "large about 800 …
SIDin #8 — Aleksi Eeben interview (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon interviews aleksi-eeben , "a coder and a musician that had created some useful tools for creating music" — the low-rastertime C64 editor John Player and the four-channel sample tracker Polly Tracker , released …
SIDin #8 — Catweasel Mk4: a PCI card with two SID sockets (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon buys Individual Computers' Catweasel Mk4, a PCI floppy-controller card with two sid sockets, fits a 6581 pulled from a dead C64, and gets Simon White's Linux hardsid driver to recognise it — but not yet to play …
SIDin #8 — Tiny Sid Compo, the 512-byte entries (Stefano Tognon, 2005) summaryTognon prints and comments the four entries of the 512-byte category of his tiny-sid-compo (2005): his own 15BB , Crue Gurl (A Life in Hell), Twone Five ( laxity ) and the winner Empty (4mat). Each is a complete …
SIDin #9 — Catweasel Mk4 follow-up: driver, hardware buffer, two 6581s and the filter (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's second article on the catweasel Mk4 — a PCI card with two sid sockets — after the first one ended with "horrible" sound. He finds and patches a timing bug in Simon White's Linux driver, explains what the card's …
SIDin #9 — Nata (Stephan Parth) interview (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryTognon's interview with nata , "a very young and active Italian composer" who started SID music in 2003 and composes in goattracker — a portrait of the mid-2000s cross-composing scener: GoatTracker 2.2 with reSID …
SIDin #9 — Tiny Sid Compo, the 256-byte entries (Stefano Tognon, 2006) summaryThe ten 256-byte entries of the 2005 tiny-sid-compo , with code and Tognon's notes — the counterpart of s-sidin08-tiny-sid-512b . At this size the players stop looking like drivers: code is copied into the zero page and …
Soundmonitor lineage and wiki pages: tracker-history/soundmonitor.txt, C64-Wiki.de, de.wikipedia summaryThree small pages that fill in versions, dates and the German-language view of soundmonitor .
The Brief History of SID — Jan Harries (SIDwave), Vandalism News #64 (2015) summaryA scener's memoir of C64 music from 1982 to the 2010s, written by a ripper who says he has "seen many players, 5600+ to be exact" — opinionated, sometimes score-settling, but full of first-hand claims about who wrote …
The CheeseCutter Guide — the recovered site manual (Wayback) summaryThe manual exists after all: the dead homepage's Guide page — enumerated out of the Wayback CDX index after the live site, the repo and the release zips all came up empty — documents cheesecutter 's default player, …
The SID Homepage — Interview with Bob Yannes (Andreas Varga, August 1996) summaryandreas-varga 's e-mail interview with bob-yannes , the designer of the sid , done in August 1996 for the sid-homepage ; some questions came from King Fisher of Triad. The first half is about intentions and regrets, the …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Jeroen Tel (Commodore Zone 1997, 64'er 3/91) summaryTwo reprinted interviews with jeroen-tel on the sid-homepage : a long commodore-zone interview from June 1997 (Warren Pilkington gave permission) and a short one from the German magazine 64'er, issue 3/91. Between them: …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Martin Galway (Commodore Zone 6–7, Happy Computer 11/86) summaryTwo interviews with martin-galway reprinted on the sid-homepage : a long commodore-zone one from the mid-1990s and a short Happy Computer one from November 1986, when he was twenty and at Ocean. Together they give the …
The SID Homepage — Interviews with Rob Hubbard (Commodore Zone, Happy Computer 7/86) summaryTwo interviews with rob-hubbard reprinted on the sid-homepage : a commodore-zone question-and-answer by Waz and Kenz (answered "within 24 hours", from Electronic Arts, about 1997) and a short Happy Computer interview …
The SID Homepage — The creation of the SID chip (Christer Rindeblad) summaryA short column by Christer Rindeblad, reprinted on the sid-homepage , on how the sid came to be, with three quotes from bob-yannes . Its dates (project start, team, months of development) are the ones the wiki has for …
TW #54 — Interview with Quantam Porcupine summaryzinc interviews quantam-porcupine (properly "Quantum Porcupine", as he points out at the end), a 17-year-old pianist-turned-tracker who came from Music Construction Set on the C64 through Whacker Tracker to …
uCApps MIDIbox SID — Wavetable Sounds Tutorial #1 (Thorsten Klose) summaryThorsten Klose's tutorial for the MIDIbox SID (a DIY MIDI synthesizer built around real SID chips) shows how to take a drum sound out of a SID tune and rebuild it as a "wavetable" — in the C64 sense of the word: "a …
Vandalism News #63 — Interview with Matt Gray (Jazzcat, 2014) summaryThe longest matt-gray interview: how he learnt 6502 to build his player, what he thinks a player is, why System 3 let him go, the Sanxion trick behind his Bangkok Knights bass, and his 1990s pop career (Motiv8, …
VGMPF wiki: Chris Hülsbeck summaryThe most detailed dated timeline of chris-huelsbeck 's C64 years anywhere on the web — a fan wiki, so every date below is second-hand, but it cites the interviews it was built from (listed at the end of the raw page).
VGMPF wiki: Maniacs of Noise, Jeroen Tel, Charles Deenen (+ the C64-Wiki roster) summaryFan-wiki pages (secondary, but dated and footnoted to disk-mag interviews) that say plainly how maniacs-of-noise worked: one driver, written by charles-deenen , into which jeroen-tel and the others typed hex in Turbo …
VGMPF wiki: Matt Gray summaryA short fan-wiki page, useful for two facts about matt-gray 's tools before his own driver and for a dated game list.
VGMPF wiki: Soundmonitor, TFMX Editor (C64) and The Great Giana Sisters (C64) summaryThree VGMPF pages that together describe the editors chris-huelsbeck used on the C64 and what happened to the great-giana-sisters music between editor and game.
Walleij — A SID player routine (MIDI-driven player design, note tables, hard restart) summaryDesign notes, in pseudo-code, for a MIDI-controlled sid player, written on request from Michael Kleps (the "M.K." of the extended Soundtracker module signature and author of the QuadraSID VST). linus-walleij learned how …
Wikipedia (en): Chris Huelsbeck summaryTertiary, but with two things the wiki did not have: the citation trail (the 64'er contest was announced in issue 6/1986, p. 173) and a claim about who co-created TFMX.
Wikipedia — Goto80 (en) summaryThe English Wikipedia article on goto80 (revision of 2026-02-02), a tertiary/secondary source: every claim below is Wikipedia's, resting on the article's own citations (Discogs, goto80.com, Truechiptilldeath interviews, …