Over the years, a lot of work has been done to simulate the Commodore 64 6581 SID chip, but as [SlipperySeal] Speaking of which, nothing is better than the real thing. His views on MIDI SID-based synthesizers Not only does it sound great, but it also looks very business.
The 6581 SID can be said to bring Commodore 64 some of the best sound capabilities of any home computer in the 8-bit era (if you disagree, please make sure to “close” in the comments). The 6581 is a three-voice analog synthesizer with a dizzying array of settings. At that time, most home computers could only manage “beep” sounds of different lengths and frequencies.
When you mix the functions of MIDI and SID, you will get something like [SlipperySeal]The synthesizer that looks great is called “Monty”. Although the road to this point unfortunately resulted in the bombing of several SID chips, the sacrifice seems to have paid off.
Realizing the limitation of “only” three sounds, Monty was designed to use two SID chips in parallel to provide a total of six sounds in pleasant stereo. MIDI commands are transmitted to the dual SID through the ATmega1284p microcontroller. SID is well understood at this point, and [SlipperySeal] Explains the basic principles of SID programming in detail GitHub.
This is not the first MIDI synthesizer based on the C64 SID chip, but [SlipperySeal] Make sure he stands out from the crowd. The seven-segment display centered on the circuit board constitutes a very simple visualizer. When running two Monty circuit boards at the same time, the effect looks better, each circuit board responds to alternate MIDI channels (see the video below) . Of course, we are also fans of projects that include ominous and mysterious key switches.