6 ms·
Chipsynth C64 is an emulation of the SID so good, it can replace hardware
- leptons 3y agoWow lots of hype about this out today - it showed up twice in my youtube feed. It does sound pretty good. Not sure it will see much use outside of demoscene musicians though. I would love to be hearing more c64 music in my life though, glad Chipsynth exists. Now what am I going to do with the half dozen SID chips I've been hoarding for the last 30 years?
- steve1977 3y agoLet me know if you want to get rid of them ;) (I think the Sidstation is the only synth I regret selling, well maybe together with the Jupiter-6)
- ninjin 3y agoTherapSID (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion too) [1], looks to my eye to be a viable alternative to the SidStation. I have a deep love for the SID sound, despite never having a Commodore as a child (I am just a wee bit too young) and the SidStation and now TherapSID tempts me to try to learn play an instrument despite being an adult. They just look like so much fun. [1]: https://www.twistedelectrons.com/therapsid https://www.twistedelectrons.com/therapsid
- bayindirh 3y agoThere are bands which use SID chips/sound in their music, and they are not demoscene musicians. Machinae Supremacy comes to mind [0]. I esp. selected a song which their SID tunes are very audible. Normally they do it way more subtly. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVnwR5C07I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFVnwR5C07I
- soundsubs 3y agoI bought it yesterday and I'm loving it. It's really good! AND NO SAMPLES! I want to support developers like this who make something out of bounds with math instead of same old same old (samples, kontakt player, half done synth engine) I appreciate the level of detail and effort he put into this emulation, and it ALMOST cures my lust for a THERAPSID mk3.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoNo samples? Damn. That was done by using 4bit sample data and using those values to set the audio level.
- oidar 3y agoHow CPU intensive is it?
- soundsubs 3y ago(VST beta tester here) Seems fine so far over 24 hours. Typically VST's cause spiking and audio glitching right away, so this build seems good, albeit 1.0.0
- WalterSear 3y agoI think the parent wanted to know how big of a SID orchestra they can expect to build.
- trinsic2 3y agoWhat do you need to run this?
- soundsubs 3y agoWhat: I'm using Cakewalk Sonar, but any DAW that supports VST3
- nickt 3y ago15 years in the making - incredible effort guys. Will we have to wait another 15 years for the ZX Spectrum version? :)
- wdfx 3y agoAY emulation exists in https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace
- wdfx 3y agoI recently came across https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace Super impressive tracker and emulator for many different 8 bit synth chips. As a personal project I'm also embarking on a 4x AY-3-8910 chip synth all hooked up to as esp32-s3 for usb midi
- wdfx 3y agoMore info about my synth build idea https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace/discussions/1605 https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace/discussions/1605 I already have the chips. 10x AY from AliExpress for £7 and they turned out to be the real deal.
- reassembled 3y agoWow! That is a very impressive feature set. I’ve used Deflemask but this seems to have a much bigger chip roster.
- mrob 3y agoThis appears to be proprietary software. If you prefer Free Software, reSID also provides very good SID emulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReSID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReSID
- radarsat1 3y agoAlthough its sound is legendary, I can imagine it's not that complicated a chip. Had anyone ever tried to replicate it with discrete components?
- bayindirh 3y agoThe sound of SID comes from its architectural decisions and how the die behaves as an integrated circuit. IIRC, SID has no real mute on the outputs, so oscillators and output stage is always active. This, in turn, injects its legendary background noise to the generated sound regardless of there's a wave being generated or not. Moreover, the distortion itself is coming from the internal noise of the die itself, as a secondary effect of being an integrated circuit, plus its fabrication technology. As a result, the sound of a SID chip is result of its design plus the secondary effects introduced because of its fabrication process. This is what makes simulating a SID very hard. You need to characterize and formulate these secondary effects and inject them to your pure generation (design) simulation real-time, without much processing overhead. This is really hard. Maybe not in the math department, but integration, coding, optimization and stabilization department. P.S.: This is why Machinae Supremacy started making music with real SID chips.
- whizzter 3y agoIn addition to this (and this is a huge part of what makes it hard to emulate) is that parts of the chip works in the analogue domain, that combined with the added outputs/noise/etc is what makes for the richness to be so hard to emulate.
- bayindirh 3y agoYou're right. I forgot that some parts of SID is actually analog. Thanks for the addendum.
- radarsat1 3y agoAh I see that's pretty insane. So the character of the sound doesn't just come from the circuit but is really intrinsic to the chip design. That's some really clever engineering.
- crtified 3y ago[see me answering my own question, at bottom of comment] Is there scientific data supporting the verbal "it's really good" and "we did lots of research" claims? Such as mdfourier testing and comparison with the original chips, or equivalent scientific scrutiny and comparison of the respective outputs? The claims may well be true, but the greater the claim to merit, the more robust the supporting evidence should be. [Answer follows: ] Yes there does appear to be some, at approx 10m45sec of this Youtube video which is contained within the OP link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePq68HaI7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pePq68HaI7M
- whizzter 3y agoSkimming the article, it does seem like they've built a model (there has been much work over the years on opensource emulators,etc so the basic operation is fairly well researched) and then sampled a bunch of real chips to find variances and behaviours to get profiles that comes close to the real ones. As for being scientifically correct, Commodore was infamous for cutting corners so resistances (and prob other parts of fabrication) varied wildly so at best you can probably compare to specific chips (even if families of fabrication are closer,esp w.r.t to 8580 vs 6581 behaviours). Read the article again in that light (as those details are alluded to) or look at the analysis of the C-64 graphics chip colors (There is a nugget in the response from the Sid-chip designer at the bottom of this other article about Commodore inner workings). http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/ http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/misc/vic656x/colors/
- leptons 3y ago>As for being scientifically correct, Commodore was infamous for cutting corners so resistances (and prob other parts of fabrication) varied wildly so at best you can probably compare to specific chips (even if families of fabrication are closer,esp w.r.t to 8580 vs 6581 behaviours). It would be really neat if Chipsynth were capable of emulating those different resistances, to tweak them a bit to get a 'warmer' sound or something different, to allow further tweaking of the sound. I'm not sure if Chipsynth is emulating at the silicon gate level, or the analog circuits within the SID. Would be cool if it were.
- H1Supreme 3y agoI have the Chipsynth MD, which is a Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis) based synth from Plogue and it's one of my favorite plug-in synths. It's pretty remarkable how much it nails the sounds from those games. This video shows some insight into the development process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=VLxTHYGLKY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=VLxTHYGLKY0
- trinsic2 3y agoWow! Some really cool sounds you can make with this setup
- MenhirMike 3y agoThe Plogue stuff is really high quality, though I wonder how it compares to their own chipsounds which already did the SID - I guess it's more all-encompassing of the different SID variants? Anyway, will give it a look later, this is neat! (Good to see they're explicitly calling out PWM, that's one of the key parts that made so much of the sound work so well on the machine)
- LanzVonL 3y agoThere are unique qualites inherent to the SID itself that makes it impossible without a circuit-level simulation that also models signal leakage and crosstalk because that's why it sounds like it does. Gigs of research, they claim, what's that even mean? No sir I'll stick with my MSSIAH.
- jerrysievert 3y agomy problem with this is that they aren't telling you what they're selling. they say they're selling deep Sid chip emulation, but for what platform and for what formats? if I knew, I'd either be all over it, or wait until they supported what I was after (in my case, AU synth on macos), but without any information on what I'd be buying, it's a very hard sell.
- alspaca 3y agoThere's a system compatibility table on Plogue's main page for it. Standalone, VST3, AU and AAX on macos.
- jerrysievert 3y agodo you have a link? I searched for a while :)
- bmitc 3y agoIt's in the first sentence of the article. > Today, Plogue is launching chipsynth C64, an AAX/AU/VST3/CLAP plug-in recreation It's also discussed in the manual: https://s3.amazonaws.com/chipsynth/C64_manual.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/chipsynth/C64_manual.pdf
- BlindEyeHalo 3y agoBecause OP is just a news website. This is the product page of the manufacturer: https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-c64.html https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-c64.html
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- weinzierl 3y agoI already have a SID emulation from Plogue from a couple of years ago. An overview what is new would have been nice. I think at least the UI looks a bit smoother buy otherwise it is hard to tell if an upgrade is worth it.