It's incredible how that chip still holds up well today, and people are still using it to create music. There was a particular tune I wanted to link to, but can't find it unfortunately.
"Kernkraft 400" (English: Nuclear Energy 400) is a song performed by German techno artist Zombie Nation and the first single from their 1999 debut album Leichenschmaus. A remix of the SID track "Star Dust" by David Whittaker, from his 1984 Commodore 64 game Lazy Jones, it peaked at number 22 in Germany in February 2000 while becoming a top-10 hit in the Netherlands and Belgium's Flanders region a few months later
---waiting to create sid tracks, stable diffusion style, to sample cut and layer in the future.
One of my "back of the head" idea is to build a nerual net that could translate the SID commands into the sound it produces. Anybody know what would be the most suited NN architecture to do that (I've looked around a bit, but didn't find anything "ready-to-use")....
That sounds challenging - I'd love to see how you get on. I had a kind of related idea - train a model on a particular synth, then when passed a sample with a synth sound in it, it would try to suggest the patch settings that would most closely emulate the sound.
These players work in a perhaps surprising way, they emulate the complete machine to run the part of the original code that programs an emulated SID chip. So it’s not like MIDI or something where the storage is a stream of commands in sequence.
Damn, this is awesome work. Grew up with the C64, always wondered as a kid what these 'scene' intros to tapes my dad bought at swap meets were, of course later learning about the talented individuals in the demo scene.
Nice to have this part of the culture and history preserved and presented in such a way.
In the 90s, early 2000's, there was a resurgence of the SID music scene that may not be widely acknowledged. During this time, new SID editors/players and techniques were developed, introducing a fresh sonic landscape with previously unheard sounds coming from the SID chip. Here's a few of my favorites from this era:
I had to restrain myself from posting more, but I believe these examples will give you an idea. The C64 demoscene is still very much alive, by the way, with great SID tunes being released even today.
