Why was the SID chip for C64 so fucking God tier awesome?

because Tim Follin could literally compose a masterpiece using a fucking toaster

It's too bad the SID was grossly misused by Yuropoors who made fart wave chiptunes. I do wish more game music had sounded like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Xbf1V_028

Muh childhood.

https://youtu.be/c7zv0bCJg_E

>>3255428
Yeah that's a great soundtrack dude. Sounds like a hambeast queefing through a kazoo.

>>3255457
>>3255428
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-pilNXqb_A

It's just copied straight from the NES version.

>>3255428
That sounds more like a NES tune than a C64 one.

>>3255428
Then why did Americans never ever do anything with the SID beyond the default envelopes?

Obligatory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93nIljXpqUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5m6ODRUfUY

Because it was a full-fledged subtractive synthesizer on a chip, unlike the basic square waves and noise generators in the others computers/consoles of this era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyVSx-IJBZA

Explain yourselves, Murka.

>>3255514
Kind of cherry picking because I can point out many horrendous arcade ports done by British devs like US Gold and Ocean.

Some argue that the Atari 8bit computer has a nicer sounding sound chip than the C64.

What do you make of this claim?

Sound Chips General?

Why is the SNES S-SMP so bad?

>>3255629
It's better if you prefer that clean chiptune sound.

>>3255670
Because you need to shitpost
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbWxBwTLGQs&list=PL39577E20E536C854&index=5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg-nWFfTvzM&list=PL39577E20E536C854&index=6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3fo9KSB9h0&list=PLF4AB0AA962A9E658&index=9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9RVZVtuMn8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TiEfain5LM

>>3255404
The SID was specifically designed to make music. Most soundchips were designed just to output some audio for beeps and sound effects, but the SID was designed more like a standard synthesizer, with the needs of musicians in mind (envelopes, filters, waveforms, etc).
It's got issues (namely, the massive tone difference between each SID filter that was never really resolved), but it was overall designed like a musical instrument.

>>3255629
it's entirely a lie in every way
it's got one more channel, but the POKEY has atrocious pitch accuracy, can't do low-pitched notes very well, you lose channels if you're trying to do certain hardware effects (like bass notes or SID-style PWM sweeps)
the SID actually had pitch accuracy taken into consideration in its design, something no one else making computer soundchips seemed to care about at the time

>>3255670
it's not too bad
the 64kB sample RAM is hilariously limiting though, even with 4-bit ADPCM compressed samples saving space, but you can do quite a bit
there's also a somewhat "hard" low-pass filter on the output (it's relatively soft all things considered, you can still get pretty high frequencies without attenuation, but it's one of the things giving the machine the characteristic muffled sound) to clean up the very lo-fi sound of the samples from due to their short size to save space and due to the compression being lossy

>>3255921
"Most sound chips at that time (1981) seemed to have been designed by people who didn't understand music."

-- Bob Yannes

>>3255941
keyword: most

The 6581 SID is also really fragile and easy to destroy with static electricity. The 8581 is much more durable but a lot of people don't like its sound quality.

The TMS 9919 which came out the same year as POKEY also sounds quite bad.

>>3255481
What does envelopes mean in terms of chip audio?
Can they be folded or licked?

>>3256096
envelopes are automated control of sound parameters

on a normal synth, you'd press the key, and generally volume would go though an ADSR envelope
>(A)ttack
how quickly to fade volume from 0 to max when note is pressed
>(D)ecay
how quickly to fade note to sustain level
>(S)ustain
how loud to hold the note
>(R)elease
how quickly to fade the note from sustain to 0 once the note ends

On the C64, this meant that your sound routines didn't have to constantly be fiddling with the volume parameters all the time, you could feed the SID note data as it appeared in the song.

>>3256179
What I mean is that almost all NTSC Commodore 64 games use the default sound envelopes as if they programmed everything strictly like the C64 Programmer's Reference told them. Whereas European devs experimented and even developed their own custom music composition software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1jKHHeufS0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDx_wNMig3Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ShSYK4jHsk

(ignore the German text, it's a translated NTSC game)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5590VCQmSw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atEug-jQ9zk

Nationalistic flame wars are stupid. Both US and Yuro devs made vital, interesting games and you need both ours and their games for the complete C64 experience.

>>3256419
You're too reasonable for this board.

Trying to program it in BASIC is comparatively shitty against the ease of VIC-20 sound programming.

>>3256397
>What I mean is that almost all NTSC Commodore 64 games use the default sound envelopes as if they programmed everything strictly like the C64 Programmer's Reference told them.
that's probably exactly it
Really, the US C64 scene wasn't really there. I can't think of much that really pushed the machine from US devs (at the very least, I can't think of anything offhand).

Clever use of envelopes could do some major special effects (like on the Atari ST, where the envelope repeat is set to trigger really quickly and it's used to modulate a channel for sawtooth effects and pseudo-resonant filter sounds and shit).

>>3256591
>Really, the US C64 scene wasn't really there

>all those Epyx, Broderbund, Microprose, and LucasArts games were just a fairy tale parents told to their children at bedtime

>>3256816
I mean, there wasn't the fanatical, almost religious devotion to home computer games. Aside from LucasArts adventures, most American games were very boring, dry dungeon crawlers and simulations. For whatever reason, Yanks were incapable of making anything silly, weird, wild, and cartoony.

Judging by archived Usenet posts, PC gaming always had a rather fanatical neckbeard following here.

Who's your favorite C64 composer /vr/?
Mine is rob hubbard

>>3256850
PC's are very personal things.

>>3255921
The POKEY kicks ass for low-notes, do you even Ballblazer bro?

>>3255404

Bob Yannes based the SID on his Sequential Pro-One synth that he owned at the time.

For modern 8580 goodness, check out LMan's works. He is the new god.

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>subtractive synthesis

The SID is the real deal. Shame the VIC is so noisy though. Setting the border color to black and blanking the screen helps. PSID64 has this built in as a keypress option and is highly recommended. Or the basic equivalent:

poke 53280,0
poke 53265,peek(53265)and 239

A better solution to is to move the preamp circuit off the motherboard and onto a daughterboard under the sid. Some of the dualsid solutions do this, including the new sidfx.

>>3262929
I'm at the point where I get hard just seeing the font Sequential Circuits used in their logo. Like if a truck drove by and they had their energy drink advertised using the same typeface as the prophet I would start leaking clear stuff thinking about Zombi arpeggios

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>SID chip

A work of art, dear to my heart.