_{Notice : this Site is under construction
and will be updatet every Day t´ill its
perfection. But it´s already working}

Abstract:

 In the early 80ties  an electronic engeneer called Robert Yannes created a lowcoast sound chip, the so called cmos6581.It specialy designed for the commodore´s C64, a home computer with 64kb ram, 4 kb basic-rom, 16 colors, 2 joystick ports, userport and paralell port. This computer was initialy designed as a game computer. C64  became so popular, that it was the most sold computer ever seen. This was due, not only by the fact that it had powerfull grafic capabilities, at this time, but also this very powerfull  sound chip, also known under the name SiD. The initials "S.I.D" are standing for the name: Sound Interface Device. The technical specifications are the following:
 

3 TONE OSCILLATORS
Range: 0-4 kHz
4 WAVEFORMS PER OSCILLATOR
Triangle, Sawtooth, Variable Pulse, Noise
3 AMPLITUDE MODULATORS
Range: 48 dB
3 ENVELOPE GENERATORS
Exponential response
Attack Rate: 2 ms - 8 s
Decay Rate: 6 ms - 24 s
Sustain Level: 0 - peak volume
Release Rate: 6 ms - 24 s
OSCILLATOR SYNCHRONIZATION
RING MODULATION
PROGRAMMABLE FILTER
Cutoff range: 30 Hz - 12 kHz
12 dB/octave Rolloff
Low pass, Bandpass,High pass, Notch outputs
Variable Resonance
MASTER VOLUME CONTROL
2 A/D POT INTERFACES
RANDOM NUMBER/MODULATION GENERATOR
EXTERNAL AUDIO INPUT

Motivations:

Most of all modern synthesizers, have "perfect" sound capabilities, and don´t invoque large interest, any more. On the other way, a good Soundtrack,needs more an interesting sound than a complex melody. The tendences in sound research for modern song productions are following the way of alternative sounds, with a light tuch of dirt.(so called lowfi sounds). But unfortunaltely today it seems that we have now problems to create characterized sounds, since the technical specifications of modern sound synthesis are so good, that the resulting Tone of such synthesizers have sterile characteristics!   That Alternatives could be found in using old sound devices, which sound characteristics no more figures in the mind of the audience. I think that the sound of the commodore c64 is able to give entire satisfaction in that way. Unfortunatlely the cmos 6581 is an extremely suceptible chip, and because oft that, a very rare device.
During the last 4 years many researches was held to transport SiD sound from c64 to other devices like pc or midi. Some examples are:

         -Stand alone Instruments (f.ex.:SIDSTATION)
        -Hardware integration of original SID chip on pc (f.ex.:HardSid,paralellport sid)
        -midiport on c64 to make it, remotable for extern Sequenzers....
        -Software based emulation as plugin for host applications
         (f.ex.: Qadrasid, SIDmod for steinberg´s Rebirth 2)
        -Simple players like (Sidplayer, resid, sidamp.....)
 

The advantages of editing SID-sound on external devices are evident: time effectiveness gain in sound editing, graphic support, no more peeks and pokes, syncronization possibilities with midi and smpte, embed capabilities with production environements like cackewalk, sonar, reason, cubase....akai mpc, quality gain due to noize reduction, and many more.

All these inventions are very interesting, but not easy to handle. The amount of functionaly intact working SID chips is decreasing at a logaritmic speed. On the other Hand, these solutions are often related with many coasts and, if you choose to build it by your own, also related with time loss. Quadrasid for example coasts more than 250 DM and the Sidstation is unaffordable for the common mortal human beeing!
 

About Generation SiD V2.0 alfa

Generation SiD is a fully programable Software-based Synthesizer that simulates the SiD sound chip. Notice: Generation SiD is not an emulation!!.It offers all features that was offred by the cmos6581. There there is also a programable Sampler with decimated bit quality to preserve the original Sample quality from SiD.  All sound parameters are controlable from a control pannel as shown in the picture below:

Only some of the features:
Controlable pitch,
vibrato amount,
vibrato amplification (to do tipical "blubber-effects"),
osc switch,
envelopes,
filtering,
filter rooting,
ring modulation,
frequency pitchshifting for extreme slides,
syncronization of the lfo´s,
timed or bpm based delay effect programming without loss of one voice!,

Some additional features:

SiD chips used to have a very crispy sound, due to errors in the manifacturing of the chips....thats, what gave them their tippical characteristic. I solved this problem by designing an error module that randomly creates subtile high frequency fluctuations, to simulate some kind of error in the sound. The result was, that i got this tipical Sid background noize. The amount of this effect is dosable, so that you also have the option to produce "clean sound". This feature has the name : sidisizer. Then i got the idea to thin out the oscilator´s signal by quantizing the output of them by bit reduction algorithmics. This controler is called decimate.

The Audio section:

You can load a wave in the sampleplayer, and pitch it through midinotes. You can also route some external audio source (cdplayer, vinyl, microphone.....), just by connecting the source through your soundcard input device (line in or microphone input). This is voice number 4. The audio can also be lofied by an option called "Dirt me!" This parameter  activates a special designed virtual 4bit a/d and d/a, to decimate the audio souce to 4bits. Notice: do do this working well, you need to set the control Reaktors settings to 1600Hz!!