OpenEuphoria

Re: Eu and SID:s

• Posted by Tor Bernhard Gausen <tor.gausen at C2I.NET> May 28, 1999
• 396 views

Stab master <stabmaster_ at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> Does anyone on this list know ANYTHING about how to emulate the SID chip on
> a PC?
> I've downloaded SidPlay for Windows, and the entire HighVoltage SID
> Collection. While listening to the cheesy old tunes of Giana Sisters and
> R-type I came up with an idea: how bout a SID-player for Euphoria?
> People who are familar with sound programming are free to give their opinion
> on this.
>
> ...so are all of you who don't...

I don't. But I do have an opinion. First of all, die hard 64 freaks like
me never think emulations sound nearly as good as the original,
but that's just because we want to stress that we are REAL die
hard 64 freaks. SidPlay is for instance (seen more objectively) not
that bad. But the emulation requires enormous computer power
compared to what you get back. The SID hardware could do pulse
waveforms, ring modulations, syncronizations and REAL TIME
RESONANCE FILTER (!) all at once. An emulator must also
simultaneously do the work of 1 MHz main processor if you want
the real thing. Even in C this must be a challenge.

So in the end, I don't see the big point.

What I would like instead is a new Euphoria programmed synthetic
music library like one of those AD-LIB routines (I don't know much
about those, just listened to the music in freeware games like
'COWS' and in some executables that can be downloaded from the
"Maniacs Of Noise" site. I think this sounds great, and at the same
time it takes up no memory compared to sample based music.

Look at the Lemon Heads game for instance. What took up all the
memory and made it awkward to download?

I would really like to give something like this a go myself, but there
are two things I don't know:

1) How to output a multi channel 16 bit signal to the soundcard
(kind of important, I guess .

2) How to do the multi-tasking, so that you can start the music and
let it play in the background while the program does other things.

I assume a simple software synthesizer could be coded in clean
EU without any machin code.

But I'm not sure...


( BTW: In the High Voltage Collection: check out
the song 'WALKMAN' under 'other composers'.
I made that in 1987  (though is says 1988).
Makes Beethoven's 5th bleak in comparison ! )


Best Regards,

Tor Gausen