from Hacker News

Commodore 64 and Raspberry Pi 4 = Synth6581

by fangorn on 6/18/21, 9:19 AM with 24 comments

• by mattowen_uk on 6/18/21, 9:44 AM

  With this, and the dual-SID add-on boards for real Commodore 64s there are not enough original SID chips to go around. Already hawkers on eBay rip them out of working C64s and sell them separately at jacked-up prices, to people who have managed to buy C64 motherboards at a lower price because they are missing their SID chips, probably in fact the very same SID chip they are now paying over the odds for separately.

  There are a few pseudo-SID hardware projects[1,2,3] that can produce 'good enough' SID-like sounds, maybe the more honourable thing is to rework this project into something that uses those ?

  ---

  [1] https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/SwinSID

  [2] https://github.com/Sgw32/UltiSID/tree/hal_usid

  [3] https://www.retrocomp.cz/produkt?id=2

• by _flux on 6/19/21, 7:25 PM

  I've sometimes wondered if neural networks could be used for replicating the differences between different 6581 chips, by having a computer automatically interrogate the chip and the neural network.

  Optimally the end result would be a 6581 chip model (or possibly just some parts of the chip) with 2d input indicating what kind of chip to use today, possibly another input for temperature, and then driven by those existing 6581 emulators.

  It could potentially use insane amounts of compute power just to run it, if it uses the same approach as those researchers that did a speech synthesizer that produced one sample at a time from the network.. But it could also have very compelling results.

• by wdfx on 6/18/21, 9:38 AM

  See also the AY-3-8910 if you cannot find a SID https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_AY-3-8910

• by EamonnMR on 6/19/21, 8:33 PM

  I would gladly shell out for a kit of this.

• by rasz on 6/18/21, 10:39 AM

  pi has enough grunt to perfectly emulate 20 sid chips /slaps forehead