HVSC — High Voltage SID Collection

The 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 popularity of SID music outlived the games; he also uses it to find "samplers", tunes such as rob-hubbard's One Man and His Droid that were written on spec before a game existed. Referenced as www.hvsc.c64.org (source: s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip). The files are sid-format tunes.

The DOCUMENTS folder#

HVSC (https://hvsc.c64.org) publishes the format itself: DOCUMENTS/SID_file_format.txt, written by LaLa from Michael Schwendt's PSID v1/v2 description, Simon White's and Dag Lem's PSID v2NG / RSID extensions and Wilfred Bos's v3/v4 additions — the header fields, the RSID rules, the clock and SID-model flags and the C64 environment a player must provide, summarised on sid-format (source: s-hvsc-sid-file-format). The collection's .sid files therefore carry the metadata (name, author, released, subtunes, clock, chip model) that players display.

The players that made the archive possible#

By 1996 "programs like SIDPLAY, PlaySID, … which emulate the SID chip up to the smallest click" existed — andreas-varga's question to bob-yannes, who had only just learned of them through the sid-homepage (source: s-sidmusic-yannes-interview). For the composers they were the archive: Hubbard in 1997 — "SidPlay has really made it possible for me to have an archive of those old tunes, as I lost all my original source code disks when EA UK moved offices (someone threw them out)"; Commodore Zone's readers played his music "either on the actual C64 — or the PC / Amiga with a SID player" (source: s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews). martin-galway's unreleased Street Hawk music was, in 2001, still waiting to "become a proper recording and a .SID file at some point" (source: s-remix64-galway-interview).

Mentions elsewhere#

• commodore-64.eu: "The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) preserves over 50,000 SID tunes", downloadable free of charge from the HVSC website (source: s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip; secondary and undated — the figure is the site's).
• Thorsten Klose's MIDIbox SID tutorial lists HVSC first among its related links: its .sid files are what siddump and SIDPLAY read when a drum is ripped from a tune (source: s-ucapps-wavetable-sounds-tutorial-1).

Rips and requests (SIDin, 2002)#

• Tognon's Dig Dug rip answered a request on LaLa's Sid Hunt list (lala.c64.org/sid-hunt) in early 2001 — the game was "not in HVSC"; the finished PSID is credited to "<?>" because the game names no composer (source: s-sidin01-dig-dug-rip; the method is on sid-format, the routine on dig-dug).
• The collection's rips are what the SIDin analyses read: the Lazy Jones file lacks the game's sound effects and was ripped from a cracked version that carries a faulty unused track (source: s-sidin02-whittaker-lazy-jones); the Driller rip likewise lacks its effects (s-sidin02-matt-gray-driller).
• Not everything in HVSC was made on a C64: luca-carrafiello's early tunes were composed on a Plus/4 running a converted Future Composer, and "many of them sound really bad" on a SID because filters, attack/decay, sync and ring modulation could not be emulated there (source: s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview).
• Agemixer's 2002 Commando cover is filed as /VARIOUS/A-F/Agemixer/Commando_Remix.sid (HVSC 4.6 paths) (source: s-sidin01-iseq).
• What a hard rip costs, and why the collection contains RSIDs at all: The Trivia Arcade has its music in a separate file with three entry points instead of the +0 init / +3 play convention, and the game calls it four times a frame from a chain of raster interrupts at lines 001, 065, 110 and 196. Tognon reconstructs the call pattern with vice breakpoints, finds the subtune variable by disassembly, writes a small raster driver around the data and lets LaLa's SIDedit write the header — as a real-C64 tune, because the result installs its own interrupt chain. The full checklist is on sid-format and sid-player-routine; the multispeed side is on its own page (source: s-sidin12-ripping-trivia-arcade).

The crew at work in 2003, and finding the engine of every tune#

• What an HVSC crew member did, per stephan-schmid (invited in October 2002 after ripping demo tunes for his Demodungeon site): "about one to two hours per day … checking a few demos or disks for unripped tunes, ripping them when necessary, contacting composers for information and verification, writing mails to the quite busy HVSC mailing lists, maintaining the Ripped Tunes list and the RSID to do list", more in the "one or two weeks before the update" spent "thoroughly checking the upcoming beta-version". He spends "90% of my time listening through the /VARIOUS directory" — the scene half of the collection, with paths such as /VARIOUS/A-F/Blues_Muz/Gallefoss_Glenn/Electronic_Transfer.sid — and ran, with Peter Sandén, a rip compo (demodungeon.com/ripcompo/) "to fill out the last empty spots in HVSC with missing SID tunes" (source: s-sidin03-schmid-interview). Tognon points rippers of BASIC games to the "Sid Hunt" list at lala.c64.org/sid-hunt (source: s-sidin03-ripping-basic-tune).
• Which player a tune uses was not in the collection's metadata in 2003–04: Tognon's pattern-searching articles and Lada Lostak's database of about 450 engines aimed "to will be able to find the engines of more that 90% of HVSC tunes"; Simon White's scanner could run all 450 signatures over the whole collection "in less than 5 seconds"; Future Composer 1.0 alone accounts for "more than 1000 tunes in HVSC" (sources: s-sidin03-pattern-searching-1, s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2; see player-identification).
• The tool that does this job for HVSC and DeepSID today is sidid: a config file of byte patterns per player name, plus an .nfo naming who wrote each driver and when. Its citations run the other way round from the wiki's — a collection path is how the .nfo identifies a player, as in "Editor that is based on the player of /MUSICIANS/H/Huelsbeck_Chris/Starball.sid" (TFMX/MasterComposer, 1990) or "based on the player of /MUSICIANS/B/Bjerregaard_Johannes/Stormlord.sid" (Audiomaster V1, 1989). Because the archive is stable and public, a path in it is a durable reference to a piece of code (source: s-sidid-player-list).

• chris-abbott, 2003: his own SIDs "for Superior Software … are in HVSC"; and against the "C64 music should be free" movement — "free C64 music is a privilege, not a right. It's only through the generosity of copyright holders and composers that RKO and HVSC exist and flourish" — the archive as something the composers permit (source: s-sidin04-abbott-interview).

How it began, told by a founder (Jan Harries, 2004)#

jan-harries's account in sidin #6 (source: s-sidin06-harries-interview): the Amiga came first — "The 100 Most Remembered C64 Tunes" (Per Håkan Sundell and Ron Birk, 1990) with a built-in 6581 emulator, then their PlaySID (1991) with about 300 tunes. Outside packs followed: "Addition" (189 of Harries's rips on PlaySID 2.0b, by his friends Wizz and Brian Nevad), Harries's own "Ripp Off #1–8" (1991–95), and Nemesis1's NemeSIDs, which merged every pack. In 1996 Harries, now on a PC, exchanged collections with Michael Schwendt (author of SIDPLAY for the PC); The Shark of INC (David Greiman) was about to release a PC counterpart of NemeSIDs, Harries added his 1364 rips, and the High Voltage SID Collection began with Harries, BOD/Talent and Schwendt as co-authors. Shark's e-mails to composers brought unreleased tunes and settled authorship — "Something that NemeSIDs wasn't really good at". Growth since: composer feedback, new team members ("Rippers, coders, credits and STIL experts"), the HVSC update tool and a platform-neutral archive. Harries's 1993 estimate was about 10,000 rippable tunes; in 2004 "we have more then 25000!", helped by Gamebase64 and the emulators CCS64, vice, Frodo and A64. Contributions go to hvsc@c64.org.

What the archive replaced, from the composers' side: JCH and Shade kept a floppy-swapped SID collection "from games and demos" in 1990, later dwarfed by HVSC; JCH briefly joined the HVSC internal mailing list around 2000 and admired its discipline (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

• Two composers on the archive in SIDin (2005–06): aleksi-eeben — "it's kind of silly that HVSC seems to hold every single 10 second test song I've made for for example John Player" (source: s-sidin08-eeben-interview); nata pointed to his own c64music\VARIOUS\M-R\Nata\Early_Tunes folder as "really worse", planned a tune for the HVSC crew's 10th anniversary, and noted that Cane's Brainball-Game "isn't in the HVSC (and probably it never will be), since it bugs after some minutes" (source: s-sidin09-nata-interview).

The companion collection: the engines, not the tunes#

hvmec — Tognon's High Voltage Music Engines Collection, announced in sidin #5 (2004) — archives the programs the tunes were made with: editors, trackers and their player routines, with binaries, sources, documentation, examples and credits. The name echoes HVSC "but the porpoise is very different": "possibly all music engines making tools are collected, so one people can easy search for a particular one" and "a good place for historical engines conservation". It is the natural other half of player-identification — once a signature has named the engine of an HVSC tune, HVMEC is where you fetch it. It is also where the wiki's editor-versus-tracker distinction comes from: HVMEC classifies by whether note length is written explicitly (tracker; source: s-sidin05-hvmec).

The archive in the 2020s#

New tools still feed it. Packed defmon tunes are in the collection and are found through a player search on DeepSID (deepsid.chordian.net/?player=…&search=defmon, chordian's browser-based front-end), which the defMON wiki points its readers to and which the tool's own community treats as the de-facto defMON jukebox; martin_demsky's defMON tunes were accepted in the 2020-12 update (sources: s-defmon-wiki-releases, s-chipmusic-defmon-thread). The route out of a modern C64 editor into the archive is the same as it was in 1996: pack the tune, export a .sid, submit it.

To verify#

• Confirmed by the SIDin news: numbered updates throughout 2002–2015, the complete songlength database shipped with the collection from update 42 (June 2005), per-composer /MUSICIANS directories from update 46 (source: s-sidin-news-digest). (unverified) VICE's vsid plays its .sid files — settled by sidin #15's "JSIDPLAY2" article (raw/sidin/sidin15.txt, p. 42: "we have emulator like Vice that can be used as sidplayer by using the VSID program"), which is in raw/ but not yet summarised; it is the ingest that would close this. (That SIDPLAY/PlaySID-type emulator-players play the collection's .sid files is now sourced above and on sid-format.)

Release timeline 2002–2015 (from the SIDin news)#

sidin's News sections reported every update; sizes are the collection's own "should contain" figures (source: s-sidin-news-digest).

• 5.0, 2002-08-17: "an epochal version: it uses the new sid file format PSIDv2NG" (sid-format), ~18,616 files. 5.1 = update 33, 2002-10-26: the first RSID real rips, 19,203. 5.2 = 34, 2002-12-21: 1009 new SIDs, 20,325. 5.3 = 35 (June 2003): 20,660. 5.4 = 36, 2003-10-09: 21,272. 5.5 = 37, 2003-12-19: 23,453 — martin-galway's "long lost Street Hawk" in two versions (via chris-abbott and "Boz" Bowness) and new tunes from matt-gray, jeroen-tel and other classic composers.
• 38, 2004-02-21: 25,149 — "the magical 25,000 mark". 5.7 = 39, 2004-05-27: 27,087; the unreleased queue emptied; real BASIC rips as RSID with a _BASIC suffix; Wilfred Bos (ACID 64) rejoined the crew. 5.8 = 40, 2004-09-27: 27,653; ~500 multispeed tunes re-timed because a PAL frame is $4CC7, not $4CF9 cycles (50.125 Hz).
• 5.9 = 41, 2005-01-26: 29,055. 42, June 2005: 30,001 — version numbers now equal the update number, the complete songlength database included (Laust Brock-Nannestad, stephan-schmid), three tunes earn a composer directory. 43 2005-09-21: 30,743; 44 2005-12-24: 31,330; 45 April 2006: 32,000.
• 46, 2007-01-21: 33,000 and the "Fundamental directory structure change" — /DEMOS and /GAMES split 0-9/A-F/G-L/M-R/S-Z, root and VARIOUS merged into a flat /MUSICIANS. 47 July 2007: 34,127 (Steppe retired as admin, Rambones — jan-harries — took over). 48 March 2008: 35,030. 49 2008-11-09: 36,081. 50 2009-05-01: the _PSID hacks with RSID equivalents removed (573 files). 51 2009-08-22: 36,937; 52 2009-12-24: 37,801; 53 2010-06-25: 38,714.
• 54 Christmas 2010: 39,626. 55, 2011-06-25: 40,400 — PSID v3 "to allow SID files meant to be played in stereo", 32-character text fields, no filename length limit. 56, 2011-12-23: 41,250 — "we finally got rid of all PlaySID/Sidplay1 specific SIDs … Quite a milestone." 57 2012-06-24: 42,212; 58 2012-12-21: 43,116; 59 2013-06-28: 43,856; 60 2013-12-22: 44,670; 61 2014-06-28: 45,418; 62 2014-12-21: 46,056; 63 June 2015: 46,851.
• Around the collection: the "Best Of Various" fan vote (BOV 2002), Steppe and Yodelking's rip compo for HVSC (2003: 88 RSID rips, 65 SID Hunts), SOASC's recordings of every tune on both chips (2007), HVSC Search 1.4 on exotica.org.uk (2010).

Related#

sid-format · sid · commodore-64 · sid-homepage · siddump · hvmec · sidid · player-identification · defmon · chordian

Sources#

s-newman-driving-the-sid-chip · s-hvsc-sid-file-format · s-sidmusic-yannes-interview · s-sidmusic-hubbard-interviews · s-remix64-galway-interview · s-commodore-64-eu-sid-chip · s-ucapps-wavetable-sounds-tutorial-1 · s-sidin01-dig-dug-rip · s-sidin02-whittaker-lazy-jones · s-sidin01-carrafiello-interview · s-sidin01-iseq · s-sidin03-schmid-interview · s-sidin05-pattern-searching-2 · s-sidin03-ripping-basic-tune · s-sidin04-abbott-interview · s-sidin06-harries-interview · s-sidin08-eeben-interview · s-sidin09-nata-interview · s-sidin-news-digest · s-sidin03-pattern-searching-1 · s-sidin05-hvmec · s-sidid-player-list · s-sidin12-ripping-trivia-arcade · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-defmon-wiki-releases · s-chipmusic-defmon-thread