Emulating the SID the HARD way. 

Thank you so much for all the comments and questions. Just have some little points to clarify: This should not be interpreted as me implying that anything here is in the best research or the best results you can get out there. That's for others to decide. Think of it more like a journal of our own journey into it, without taking other project’s implementations. I have huge respect for the work done by others on the SID over the years, don’t get me wrong. Something that was not ill intended but got wrongly interpreted however: In the Song QA section: each time you hear a song, and there is a picture of a specific SID, you are actually hearing THAT SID, not our emulator’s take on it. The goal here was to highlight each original chips sonic differences more than anything. Show the challenge it represented as it were. I could have posted the A/B and will probably do it somewhere, or you can also do it yourself with the app. Here is Jammer's Club Stylier (one of the tracks we QA'ed) if you want to A/B with headphones or whatnot Think we got really close, but up to you to decide: soundcloud.com/chipsounds/jammer-club-stylier-rea-8580-then-csc64s-8580 Thank you!

i just can't imagine amount of work put into understanding what is "the average SID chip" and then all the deviations from this average.

In a tech world dominated by soulless, clueless & disinterested "investors", brand vultures (like the one that just ate Moog, FFS), and sociopathic corporate executives, Plogue/David shows what true love for music tech (and its community) looks like. Some of these videos' contents go well over my head (dyscalculia, among other limitations), but they've also made me into an admirer. Witnessing David's passion and respect for computer-music tech is inspiring. My own love of tech has mostly been killed by ultra-capitalism and abusive corporations, but some of it still lingers on within me (and is why I have a retro/classic-computer setup in my studio). This part of me seriously wakes up, gurgles with nostalgic joy, while witnessing the immense amount of obsessively-detailed work done by David/Plogue, and his efforts to describe and explain his work to us in these videos. I don't consider myself a chip-music fan in specific, but my music-making life started with a Tandy 1000 TL/2, game music has always been meaningful & influential to me, and so this is all quite inspiring. Thanks for all the amazing work you do!!

6581 still in my original 64 from 1984 and still sounding great👍🤟

Wow, this is genuinely incredible! This is the kind of data capture that you normally only dream of!

Every now and then I get a little hope that the internet wasn't a mistake. Thanks.

Talk about dedication, love it!

Fantastic video. The electronics side of it goes over my head unless I stop and try to remember all my CS hardware classes, but what I took away from this is that you're got a real passion for this chip, for your craft and I found it very entertaining! Thanks!

Everything counts in large amounts. Thank you for your service.

My second computer was a C64. I've known for a few years how hard it is to emulate the SID, and your video provided an even more in-depth view into the difficulties surrounding that emulation 🙂

I will have to give this a shot, usually disappointed in accuracy of replacement sids and emulations but you have gone peak nerd here, and this is no doubt as good as we will ever get, bravo

Your commitment to getting accurate data is truly inspiring!

Absolutely astounding! The sheer magnitude of effort involved truly boggles my mind. The SID chip and C64 shaped my childhood, and I am profoundly grateful for all the endeavors dedicated to ensuring its everlasting presence!

6:32 "It can not play vintage tracks .." - and i just knew what would come - thy punchslashkickatomicdripdrop!

While i already bought a bunch of chipsynths/speech from you on the black week i just also bought the c64 chipsynth. Keep up the great work

Dear David, there are many things you stumbled on which I could have helped you so much with. Recently I moved away from C64 stuff to do more complex things.

Very cool. Was always hoping someone would ve crazy enough to do something like this before the opportunity was lost forever.

Wow! Glad your buddy had a C64 growing up to draw you in, this has been fascinating!

The amount of research and effort you've done is mind blowing. Congrats for the release!

I already had a C=64 since 1985. Loved playing SID music a lot I on the other hand took a blank tape to a friend's house to record the adlib version of the Ultima 6 boot up and intro music and also the character creation music. Plus had my friend take screen shots and save them as GIFS. So then over the modem he could send me the GIFS of Ultima 6 and I was able to see a crude version decoded on my C=64 with a Gif Viewer.

I'm so getting Chipsynth! I have a 6581 based SidStation (Ninja!) - while the filter is so dirty and full of character it 'breaks' too soon when playing, for example, Terra Cresta. EDIT - this research is mind blowing!

i live under a rock - so i didnt know you existed until right now. thanks for the great video! thats some cool work you're doing!

Now I know why so many SIDs disappeared from the market..... Jokes aside. Fantastic work!

Love this! 👏🏻 I've been toying with a naive SID implementation on my toy C64 emulator. I was happy just to get any sound 😂 The amount of work done here is amazing!

I'm seriously blown away by the amount of effort you put into each release! I absolutely love these videos, even if some of the coding/mathematics side of things is above what I can understand. Chipcrusher is one of my go-to effects to always use! Brilliant, David!

It was mind blowing in it's time..I was the same, couldn't get enough of the cool tunes! Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway were amazing. Great work keeping sid alive and kicking today!

You're doing good work here sir!

I dont make music, but I love your work, and of course love the SID chip sound. amazing, all the work that you did. I made some intros on C64. haha. using Last Ninja songs, I think The Wilderness. This song nearly used too much raster time to play in my intro, I remember having to fix something so it didn't cause scroller to get jerky.

Your dedication is mind boggling! ❤

incredible work

🤯Amazing work, thank you so much for the efforts that went into capturing all this.

Wow, so in depth, so happy I have found these videos!

Absolutely stellar the amount of work that must've gone into this.

Amazing the amount of work you punt into this, much respect! A truly excellent plugin release.

The dedication and passion demonstrated in this video is just incredible! Wow!

My mind is blown by the amount of work put into this. Bravo sir, bravo

This is fantastic! Looking forward to learning the new synth.

I understood almost 2% of this video. And still i was one of the five that made it until the end 😁. I love SID music since i had my c64 in 1987 and still listen everyday to SID music while playing modern games.

welp, i can't abide a gap in the chipsynth collection... awesome work as usual, and the insight into your development process is always appreciated!

Love, Love, Love, your work. Thank you!

Awesome work, i'm amazed with detailed work done! I once tried to understand the inner working of SID and was overwhelmed of complexity of it. Ended up with "good enough" emulation for PlaySID files, and i won't even dare to try cycle emulate all C64 chips for RealSID playback...

Unbelievable amount of detail and work, truly amazing and will be buying this amazing piece of software, mind blown 😛

you have done You've done an incredible job, and I can only offer my heartfelt compliments. You are preserving the essence of SID, its analog side, forever.

This is absolutely incredible! The amount of work, time, reverse engineering, testing, etc. is just unfathomable. Will definitely be picking this up, thank you!

Speechless … so looking forward to testing this synth out :D

This level of insanity is truly amazing. I love your obsession. What a fantastic achievement!

As an European it's so weird hearing the Commando soundtrack on a 60 Hz C64. That tempo is crazy fast.

You had me with my jaw on the floor. I also took a cassette recorder to record Commando's music when I was 13!!!

The SID chip is one of my favorite things in the world. There's nothing else that ever sounded quite like it.

Amazing job !!!. Hard to believe there was so much variation across SIDs !!!!!!!

Absolutely groundbreaking stuff! Hats off!

That is truely impressive. This goes into my shopping basket out of respect.

Love everything about this video.

That intro sound hit straight in the nostalgia senses 😂

I bet the creators of the SID chip (who later went on to found Ensoniq) would be totally blow away by all of this. :-)

Wow, what a treat - another plgDavid video!

very exciting and very interesting technology , brilliant DAVID, i am completely blown away by the implemented piece of technology

This is crazy! I also recorded a friend's C64 to a boombox to bring home before I had one, and when I did have one, cut up a DIN cable to get the audio line out into a proper old radiogram I had for proper amplification instead of the tinny TV speaker. Thank you for all your hard work, I can't wait to get it :)

That is very impressive attention to detail. Almost worth buying it just as an applause.

Wowow…gained a subscriber! Thankyou to the great algorithm!

My programming "career" started with the C64.. and I also hit the SID in machine code.. superb times. When I moved on to the Amiga, I was a bit disappointed that the Amiga only had sample playback, and no real analog synthy stuff. ;-)

Epic!! The sound of my youth! I loved to connect the 64 to the stereo and blasted my favorite tunes! It sounded so good! Unfortunately I don’t have a real 64 anymore. But for sure I will buy the plugin! Thank you!

Excellent. Bravo pour la vidéo et ce projet grandiose. On ressent la passion et le plaisir qui t'anime. Le début de la vidéo m'a ramené des dizaines d'années en arrière quand j'éprouvais le même emballement à entendre le son et voir la vidéo de cet ordinateur mythique qu'est le Commodore 64. Je me suis lancé aussi dans un projet passion. Je recense le savoir en LM sur le Commodore 64, je le structure et je prépare un livre pour la communauté francophone. Beaucoup de travail...

Great work.

Thank you, Pig David, for your service.

Recording chip tunes to cassette and taking them home? :D I did the same with my uncle's Sega Mega Drive back in 1993 or so. x3 Game Music has also always been something that always connected me the most to the whole Sound Architecture of 8 bit and 16 bit consoles. Really appreciating them as Synthesizers that played games. And that is why i still appreciate them so much after all those years and have deep respect towards any composer who showed us the beauty of the musicality of the 8 bit and 16 bit era.

Incredible work!!

Plogue is amazing, probably my favourite audio company

Excellent to see another chipresearch!

I’m not usually one for VSTi’s in general but this looks fucking outstanding- great video aswell 👽

You’re so crazy in a good way!

Congratulations! It was a long time coming, for sure!

Bob yannes also made the esq-1 and esq-80 synth keyboards im sad because i used to have a sq-80 that broke it also had midi problems and the battery would get very warm and keybed problems. but i wish they were remade beautiful wavetable synth with a analog filter and 8 bit waveforms.

I love everything about this

Very cool. A long time ago I created a plug-in for the old VCV rack that would play most psid/rsid files and output virtual CV/gate for the whole chip. Yep - you really do need to emulate more than the CPU and the sid, even the PLA too! I’ve got my Daisy patch playing sid files and will output CV/gate for one of the voices….I should probably make a video about that!

This popped up by the YT algorithm, not seen your channel before! Can I just say the work that you have done and what you have done is FUCKING AMAZING!! (And that's from an Atari 800 fanboy)

Really in-depth material!

Excellent sounds

This is really really informative stuff. Thanks for sharing. I am glad that chipsynthC64 finally sees the light of day. Please keep up your brilliant work. Much appreciated from each and every vintage sound blippybloppy chip lover!!! :) Any plans to do output routing of different sid voices/oscillators to different audio outputs of the VST? That would be awesome.

The man, the mind, the effort 👏

This is the heavy side of the hobby :) very cool research :)

Very interesting! Thank you for your great work David!

Need another challenging song that doesn't sound the same on any SID? Yie Ar Kung Fu 2 (intro), Martin Galway :)

Fascinating!

You are such a nerd! This is amazing! Your synth is amazing!

Priceless

You have probably put more time and effort into this than the original SID design team did for the prototype! Perhaps someone will license the original and make a new SID for the 21st century..

Nice. Again fantastic work!!

Unbelievable! Cheers!

definitely scooping this one up :9 over the years I've used MIDI carts, built a couple sammichSIDs, tried SID Guts, been keeping to the monomachine's SID lately but this thing looks just stupendous. And PCM support with no effort or jacks on my part? it _must_ be christmas!

I'm not even a C64 fanboy or anything but this is great work.

Super nice insides \o/

This was a wild ride, I'll have to say! Great work!

Oh yeah - I'm sure I used your synth or something like it in the track "Baby You're My Kind Of Weird" by Mairk

That was an insta-purchase.

This was fascinating (and daunting). I'm working on writing a C64 emulator from scratch, just to see if I can do it. I'm still working on the CPU, and look forward to trying to tackle the SID with equal parts anticipation and dread.

Amazing work.. If I may suggest some more demanding SIDs: I always use Wacek's "Snake Disco" to test filter performance, and many of Jason Page's quadspeed tunes are also pretty sophisticated.. Also Shogoon's recently released "White Light Moon" makes heavy use of distortion, too!..

OUTSTANDING

My chin met the floor. Amazing.

Absolut hervorragend!