The Brief History of SID — Jan Harries (SIDwave), Vandalism News #64 (2015)

A 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 which player, which editor the scene used when, and how the big tricks (chords, sampled drums, multispeed, hard restart) entered the culture. Treat dates and "firsts" as one witness's memory, not as settled fact.

Key claims#

Before the editors (1982–85)

• The first SID music is in the Programmer's Reference Guide; early game "composers" were programmers converting classical and pop, sometimes via MIDI, into "a crude player, just playing back the notes". 1984: David Dunn used all 11 filter bits where most used 8; Russell Lieblich's Magic Carpet had a special filter routine outside the player.
• martin-galway joined Ocean in 1984 as a programmer; Ocean gave him "a midi setup with an Atari, and a converter who turned all his compositions of 3 voice midi, into raw data", and he coded routines to manipulate that data — "that's why Martin Galway's player is so large/extensive, with macro-language". "In the process, Martin invented the chord, aka arpeggio — to play 3 or more notes in the same voice, very fast … also known as wibble, or wibbles" (chord-arpeggio).
• rob-hubbard arrived in 1985 with demos where F1–F7 switched tunes, sounds made "with ring modulation and sync"; "his player was so cleverly coded, that it needs little RAM and raster consumption (compared to Galway)". His method, told to the author: load the last tune, "swap the patches", then upgrade the player a little; "Rob's 'Monty on the Run' player, has been used in almost 30 games."
• 1986 composers "all do the music with their own method+code … None of these use a real music editor, well Galway does, but they custom code every game music, with a crude monitor, while the music runs" (sid-player-routine).

Soundmonitor and the scene composer (1986–87)

• Scene tools before: SIDPLAYER (Compute!'s Gazette; Yip of Purebyte), Master Composer (a note-sheet editor; BOGG's Album 1 and 2, "the first music disk ever").
• "Then in late 1986, the scene is given the greatest gift of all … Somebody releases what is called a TRACKER, music editor, and this concept is so easy to learn, that now everybody can make music!" — chris-huelsbeck's soundmonitor, "the actual name of the program is Music Master v1.0". His music "sounds new and fresh! … pop/rock/chris". Before 1986 ended The Parade International released Crack's Best, "2 demos, with 25-30 Soundmonitor tunes in each".
• 1986: Red (Jeroen Kimmel) of The Judges "becomes the first scener to create his own music, in Rob Hubbard's player" (Red Hubbard); 1987: Laxity, aged 14, turns Hubbard's player into source, changes it, "and at some point throws it out completely, and writes his own from scratch"; johannes-bjerregaard, laxity and Kim Jensen are "the first who write their own routines".
• 1987 editors: Ubik's Music, "the first of what we called a DUR editor" (D-2 DUR 02, like the 1990s DMC); the commercial Ariston editor (used by Demon/Neil Baldwin) and Electrosound (a grid of dots, one row per voice; Jonathan Dunn's first tool) — "Electrosound and Soundmonitor are both very heavy with raster usage, around 45-75% CPU! So Dunn has to code his own player" (Platoon).
• Maniacs of Noise: TMC/Scoop (charles-deenen) "has maybe the fastest brain of all", made his first player in 1987 and a demo with protected music, Give a Try!; his friend jeroen-tel "makes music in BASIC (none of that is released), and in 1986 Jeroen does various tunes in Soundmonitor, like the rest of C64 scene. To be honest, it's not very good. :)" Then "TMC sits down and thinks, and very fast after his first music demo, he codes the first MON (Maniacs of Noise) player. It's a clone of Rob Hubbard's players. Let's make it clear, most later used players are. It's no direct rip, but they all have the same structure. Whatever you do, if you try to code the most efficient way and the player will be able to do all effects of the SID, what you end up with is more or less the same as the Hubbard/MON way to do things." (musicfile) "When TMC and Jeroen Tel entered the world of music in games, they take it by storm."
• Status mid/late 1987: "the old guys Rob, Galway, Ben etc. are still ruling the games scene and Maniacs of Noise is coming to the top and most of the scene are stuck with Soundmonitor/Rockmonitor".

Multispeed, samples, Rockmonitor (1986–88)

• multispeed: Michael Winterberg (1986) used the CIA timer to run sounds faster; "the real 'multi-speed' way is created by Antony Crowther, with Zig Zag and Centurions X" — the player re-runs on half a frame updating some parameters, 2×; 2× and 4× became a 1990s sound (PRI, PVCF); the author chose 6× "to stand out"; Tel later made 8× tunes with "synth leads, which sounds like they actually came from a 'standard' analogue synth".
• Sampled drums, mid-1987: "both Chris Hülsbeck and Martin Galway add sampled drums to their music. But it's Galway who runs with the glory, because his game is released first. But there is a difference: Galway's digi drum routine, is real-time, and does some poking and fiddling with very few numbers, to create small scratches and drums, using the SID volume register, D418. Chris Hülsbeck does it another way, his routine plays sample data from RAM, as a streaming of data to D418, using NMI." (chip-samples)
• The Banana (The Electronic Knights) took drums from Funky Drummer (IBM Music 17) and mixed two samples for "2-voice drums, on top of the 3 voice SID tune"; then The Dutch USA-Team "take Soundmonitor from Chris Hülsbeck … and adds a digi-drum routine to it, so you can edit a drum track to your music" = rockmonitor; "5 versions are made, and then some other group takes over, and makes it into 6 versions in the end. But it never goes polyphonic." Rockmonitor tunes: Cavi/Commando Frontier, Future Freak of Dexion, OPM's Rockmonitor 2 demo tune.
• Hubbard-clone players with their own sound: 20th Century Composers, Falco Paul, Dutch USA-Team's Music Assembler ("which reyn-ouwehand starts out with"), Soedesoft, Fire-Eagle. The author disputes Soedesoft's "1986" credits in HVSC and insists "The MON sound is from TMC and JT."
• 1988: future-composer, released by Finnish Gold — "It's the first TMC/MON player, but Finnish Gold had made an editor for it. Many start using this and I guess, the largest share of unknown composer tunes are made with this." Finnish Gold also made an editor for Ben Daglish's WEMUSIC player.

The 1990s and after

• "In 1990's it was very widespread to have your own editor"; JCH's editor (1989) "was the gift to '90s, what Hülsbeck was to '80s" (Drax, Dane; the SYNC clone used by PRI). "JCH is the inventor of what we call a hard-restart. It's a little pause-trick code, so that a sound never fails and the oscillator starts from point 0 of the waveform … This has been developed by GRG to also a soft-restart" (hard-restart, chordian). GRG's SID DUZZ IT for Geir Tjelta's player; PlaySID 1991 → SIDPLAY → goattracker "somewhere in 2002" creating "a new kind of composer" (Linus, Jammer); sid-wizard as the new native editor with MIDI.
• Later sample tricks: Mahoney's 8-bit playback demos, THCM and SounDemoN, Algorithm's "Free-Running-Oscillator samples" (FRO-DIGI); 2009 Geir Tjelta's player "samples itself" on voice 3 for a fake reverb.
• The ripper's taxonomy of players: "Some set up ADSR first, then play a note, then effect, some do it differently. Some write all SID registers into a buffer and write it all at once … Some music data is packed … the raw values is what the SID needs (Hubbard method). Others read data, and 'convert' it to SID values (Galway)."

Practical takeaways#

• The recurring pattern: an efficient three-voice player converges on the Hubbard/MoN structure; what makes a composer's sound is the modulation code and the instruments, not the sequencer (sid-player-routine).
• Two ways to sampled drums in 1987 — Galway's few-byte real-time $D418 fiddling versus Hülsbeck's NMI-streamed sample data — and the scene's third, mixing two samples (The Banana), are the roots of everything on chip-samples.

Notable quotes#

"Whatever you do, if you try to code the most efficient way and the player will be able to do all effects of the SID, what you end up with is more or less the same as the Hubbard/MON way to do things."

"It was always the same with SID business… 'THE EDITOR!!!', everybody is screaming for a magical tool that will make cool music, but it never arrives. You have to learn and code it yourself."

Relevance to the wiki#

Scene-side chronology for tracker-scene-history and sid-player-routine; the Galway-vs-Hülsbeck sample story for chip-samples; the origin of rockmonitor and future-composer; MoN's driver as a Hubbard-structured clone (musicfile); JCH and hard restart (hard-restart). Memoir — cross-check dates against VGMPF and the interviews.

Pages touched#

tracker-scene-history · sid-player-routine · soundmonitor · rockmonitor · future-composer · chip-samples · multispeed · chord-arpeggio · hard-restart · maniacs-of-noise · musicfile · charles-deenen · jeroen-tel · chris-huelsbeck · rob-hubbard · martin-galway · laxity · johannes-bjerregaard · reyn-ouwehand · chordian · goattracker · sid-wizard · dmc