Collaborate Disseminate
The chiptune scene is dominated by Game Boys and other Nintendo hardware, but one should never forget the gorgeous, beautiful tones that come from the hallowed Commodore 64. [Linus Åkesson] …read more Continue reading The Commodordion Gets a Big Usability Upgrade
Developer [frntc] has recently come up with a smaller and less expensive way to not only replace the SID chip in your Commodore 64 but to also make it a …read more Continue reading A C64 SID Replacement With Built-in Games
Old-school rotary telephones aren’t particularly useful for their original intended purpose in this day and age, but they’re great fun to hack into new projects. [Linus Åkesson] has done just …read more Continue reading Dial-a-SID Is a Glorious Chiptune Jukebox
It’s brilliant enough when composers make use of the “2SID” technique to double the channels in a Commodore 64 with two sound chips, but even then some people like to kick things up a notch. Say, five times more. [David Youd], [David Knapp] and [Joeri van Haren] worked together to …read more
Continue reading How Many Commodores Does It Take To Crack A Nut?
When the Commodore 64 was released in 1982, it was a masterpiece of engineering. It had capabilities far outstripping other home computers, and that was all due to two fancy chips inside the C64. The VIC-II, the video chip for the C64, had sprites and scrolling, all stuffed into a single bit of silicon. The SID chip was a complete synthesizer on a chip. These bits of silicon made the C64 the best selling computer of all time, but have also stymied efforts to emulate a complete C64 system on a microcontroller.
[Frank Bösing] has just managed to emulate an …read more
Someone left this organ out in the rain, but [Tinkartank] rescued it and has given it a new life as a SID controller. What’s a SID, you ask? That’s the sound chip Commodore used in the C64, a remarkable chip revered among retro gamers that was way ahead of its time.
He threw out everything but the keyboard assembly for the build. Each key press now drives a momentary button, and those are all wired up to an Arduino Mega through some I/O expansion boards left over from another project. The Mega drives the MOS6581 SID chip which generates those …read more
