#hardware
- Recording samples (sources, cabling, sound cards, rates) techniqueGetting a sound from a synth, CD, tape or microphone into a sample cleanly: the part of sampling that happens before sample-looping and multisampling . Cowboy's 1996 article is the wiki's source on the hardware chain …
- 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.
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Game Boy platformNintendo's handheld; its four-channel sound chip ( game-boy-apu ) and the cartridge tracker lsdj make it one of the three focus platforms of this wiki. Facts from the LSDj manual (source: s-lsdj-manual ) :
- Game Boy sound hardware (APU) chipThe game-boy 's sound unit, the APU, has four channels that are each built differently — "unlike some other sound chips, such as the C64's SID or the Atari 5200's POKEY, each sound channel is specialized" — plus a VIN …
- Gravis UltraSound (GUS) platformThe PC sound card of the 1990s tracker scene: a wavetable card with its own sample RAM and hardware voices, which is why tracker changelogs list "GUS" as a feature, why ST3's panning command is a GUS command, and why …
- 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 …
- little-scale personSebastian Tomczak, chipmusician and prolific tutorial writer, whose 2008 blog post How to: Prepare Samples and Create LSDJ Kits is still the reference the chipmusic-org kit threads point at five years later — …
- nitro2k01 personGame Boy hardware and software specialist, and one of the recurring technical voices on chipmusic-org — the person who answers why the chip does that , usually with the register-level reason.
- Pan Docs publicationThe community-maintained technical reference for the game-boy , published by the gbdev community at gbdev.io/pandocs from the GitHub repository gbdev/pandocs and released into the public domain (CC0 1.0). Its audio …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Defense Mechanism — LSDj Noise Channel Tutorial (v9.2.L) (video, 2022) summaryWritten because the noise channel was rebuilt in 9.1.0 and the standard reference no longer applied: "there's a tutorial by Bowie Meets Robot about the noise channel for version four and it's really good … but it …
- Hackaday.io — RetroChallenge 2019: Gameboy Audiohacks (channelhacking, splitting pulse waves) summaryTwo project logs from a coder pair (Quint and utz) who spent RetroChallenge 2019 getting more than four voices out of a DMG-01 in software. Useful to this wiki for two things: an outside definition of the ghost-channel …
- Intense Tech #16 — So You Want a Cartridge Family? (Defense Mechanism) summarydefense-mechanism ( intense-tech ) on how to run lsdj on a real game-boy : three kinds of flash cartridge, what each needs, and a warning about "LSDJ cartridges" sold online. The page carries a 2024 update that …
- little-scale — $1 Nanoloop MIDI Sync (2009) summaryThe minimum viable sync box: one CMOS chip and no microcontroller , syncing nanoloop to MIDI clock. It is the design people actually built, and the comment thread is a good record of what goes wrong.
- little-scale — Sync Options for Game Boy Music (2008) summaryThe census of Game Boy synchronisation as it stood in October 2008: eighteen devices, what each one can and cannot do, and who made it. Nothing else in the wiki maps this territory.
- 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.
- little-scale — the Arduino Game Boy sync boxes: syncThing, Sync Tank and the AU$15 build (2008) summaryThree months in which a breadboard became a documented build anyone could copy for about AU$15. The important content is the pin-level wiring , which differs between lsdj and nanoloop and is stated nowhere else in the …
- little-scale — USB MIDI Game Boy Sync for $16, and DIN sync 24 (2011) summaryThree years after the Arduino boxes, the same job with no MIDI socket, no optocoupler and no power supply: a Teensy 2.0 that the computer sees as a MIDI device. This is also where the wiki gets a Game Boy link-plug …
- Pan Docs — Audio Details summaryThe internals-and-quirks page of the pan-docs audio section — "The PPU is a bunch of state machines, and the APU is a bunch of counters." It follows the signal from generator through DAC, mixer, master volume and …
- Pan Docs — Audio Overview summaryThe opening page of the audio section of pan-docs , the community Game Boy hardware reference (CC0). It names the four channels of the game-boy-apu , the VIN cartridge input and the shared concepts — triggering, …
- Pan Docs — Audio Registers summaryThe register-by-register specification of the game-boy-apu : the NRxy naming scheme (x = channel, 5 = global; NRx1 length/duty, NRx2 volume/envelope, NRx3 period low, NRx4 trigger, length enable and period high), then …
- 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 #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 …
- 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 — 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 #66 — Sound Recording (Cowboy) summaryAn engineering student's (NDSU, mechanical engineering with EE and CS; built his own speakers and sub) answer to "what is the best method of recording" for a tracker: the signal chain from source to sample, measured …