SIDPlayerDS

SIDPlayerDS

August 21st, 2006, 14:07 Posted By: wraggster

Our very own GPF has posted his entry into the Neoflash Comp, heres the details:

This is a port of SIDPlayer, by Christian Bauer, with modifications for the nds by Troy Davis(GPF). . The home page of the NDS port is http://gpf.dcemu.co.uk

What is SIDPlayer?
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SIDPlayer is a replayer program for C64 music ("SID tunes"), like PlaySID on the Amiga or SIDPLAY for Unix. You can think of it as being a stripped-down
C64 emulator that only emulates the CPU and the sound chip of the C64. SIDPlayer can replay SID tunes in the "PSID" file format, but it cannot run
any C64 programs.

Why would I want to listen to C64 music?
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The C64 had the most advanced sound capabilities of all home computers in the early 80's. While other computers of that time were only able to produce
beeps, the C64 had a complete 3-voice analog synthesizer on its MOS 6581 sound chip (called "SID" - "Sound Interface Device"). Even some more modern computers (as the Atari ST or the first Macs) had worse sound.

The SID chip features three oscillators with selectable waveform, ADSR envelope generators, programmable resonance filters and special effects like ring modulation. With the aid of the CPU, it can also replay 4-bit sampled sounds. SIDPlayer emulates all features of the SID chip, including the
filters.

There were (and are still) many composers programming excellent music for the C64 and thousands of tunes have been converted for use with SID tune replayers on nearly every existing computer platform. One big advantage of SID tunes is that they take very little hard disk space: most are only 4-8K in size.

Supported file formats
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The only SID tune file format supported by SIDPlayer is single-file PSID files (these have the signature "PSID" in the first 4 bytes). Most SID music
available on the Internet is in this format, directory browser requires they have the extension .sid or .SID

Where do I get PSID files
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The two largest collections of SID tunes are the "High Voltage" SID Collection (http://hvsc.c64.org) and the "NemeSIDs" archive(http://cvsup.de.openbsd.org/pub/hist...nemesids.lha/). These have been used for testing during the development of SIDPlayer and they should all work.

Nineteen demonstration SID tunes are included with SIDPlayer in the "sid" directory.

thanks and enjoy,
Troy Davis(GPF)
http://gpf.dcemu.co.uk

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