SID
| Sound Interface Device | |||||
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| Developer: | Per Håkan Sundell & Ron Birk | ||||
| Header: | Custom | ||||
| Content: | Programmatic | ||||
| Instruments: | Combined | ||||
Target Output
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| Released: | 1993-04-12 | ||||
| First Game: | N/A | ||||
| Extensions |
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- This page is about the rip format. For the chip, see 6581 or 8580. For the Sidplayer song format, see MUS (Sidplayer). For the Sidmon song format, see SID (Sidmon).
Sound Interface Device (SID) is a format that houses Commodore 64 music. It consists of a BASIC program or a block of machine code which writes data to the SID chip, the entry addresses of the block, the number of songs in the file, title, artist, year, publisher, speed properties, and used SID model. At a minimum, SID players emulate the 6510 CPU and SID chip in order to playback the audio, but SID files can also be loaded and played on a real C64. The Commodore 128 is not supported, but the audio alone usually does not require the extra RAM or 2 MHz and can thus play on a C64 as well.
The overwhelming majority of SID files are mono, as one chip can produce only mono sound. Some music may rely on two or even three chips (so it's called 2SID/3SID), doubling or tripling the amount of channels to make available hard left/hard right sound or even add center track to them with 3SID. Only very few games use this ability.
From 1990 to 1994, Sundell and Birk developed a SID player for their Amiga demo The 100 Most Remembered 64 Game-Tunes and for their tool PlaySID. Originally, a SID tune was spread over two files. Due to popular demand, a one-file format was introduced in PlaySID V2.2. This was the first version of the SID format.
Contents
Players
- ACID 64 Player Pro - Windows
- DeepSID - Web Browser
- DeliPlayer - Windows
- Droidsound - Android
- JAM For Windows - Windows
- RdosPlay - DOS (outdated files only)
- SID - XMPlay
- SID Decoder - foobar2000
- SIDPlay - Macintosh
- SIDPlay - Windows
- SIDPlay 2 - Winamp
- SID Player (Windows Phone) - Windows Phone
- VLC - Windows
Editors
- SidEdit - Windows
Converters
SID to ?
- JAM For Windows - Windows - WAV
- SID Decoder - foobar2000 - WAV
- SID to MIDI - Windows - MIDI, TXT
- SID to MIDI (Windows) - Windows - MIDI, TXT
- SID to WAV - Windows - WAV
- SIDPlay - Windows - WAV
? to SID
- GoatTracker - Linux, Macintosh, Windows - SNG (GoatTracker)
Games
All Commodore 64 games and programs can have their audio ripped to SID format. SSI 2001 soundtracks theoretically can be logged/converted into it, though as for now there is no possible way to do it.
Missing
The majority of popular Commodore 64/128 games have their music ripped to SID format, but this list includes games that either don't have a rip, or have an incomplete rip:
How to Obtain
Ripping SID music requires basic knowledge of the SID chip and, depending on the modularity and complexity of the sound driver, fair to intimate knowledge of MOS 6502 machine code, but luckily, most popular Commodore 64 games already have their sound ripped to SID format and can be downloaded:
- hvsc.c64.org/download.htm - High Voltage SID Collection. Note:
- Game music is intermixed with stand-alone and demo songs.
- If a question mark follows the author's name, the author is only guessed, not actually confirmed.
- HVSC does not accept further rips where every track consists of only one sample, so it is up to outsiders to rip TX (C64) and Das Knax Computerspiel (C64).
For recording, see SID - Recording Guide.
Links
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID - Wikipedia.
- youtube.com/watch?v=0xWyLeVnxFU - How samples were played on the SID chip.
