Category: Chiptunes

Chiptunes on home computers such as e.g. Commodore 64.

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The Story of DeepSID

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It’s funny how it can sometimes feel like you’ve had your proudest creation behind you.

Maybe it was the time in the 80’s with the editor and the C64 tunes. The couple of maps I created for Half-Life. Or the years where I became overly obsessed with PC games and I fell off the face of the Earth for a few years. Then I created a games checklist-and-database called GameDeed and thought, I might actually have a web site that might steal some of the thunder from The BackLoggery and HowLongToBeat. Was I on the way to my proudest creation yet? No, not really.

GameDeed turned out to be a resounding fiasco.

GameDeed

Nevertheless, GameDeed was still very important and I don’t regret the time I spent coding it. I learned so much about web development from it that later benefit DeepSID. Before GameDeed I made a few static web sites and even my own theme for WordPress, but none of that would have prepared me for the monster site that DeepSID would eventually evolve into.

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DeepYouTube

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In the end of August I introduced a new SID handler in DeepSID. But not just another emulator – this one allows you to play YouTube videos. This was something I added after I recently discovered that YouTube actually has an IFrame API that allows you to control YouTube videos using my own controls.

I made sure to make a full package out of it in the first release. Each SID row has support for up to five tabs, each with their own YouTube video, and a context menu option makes it possible to edit these tabs and even set one as the default. Even the individual subtunes of a SID row can have their own set of tabs.

Later I also added support for the ?t=123 time switch.

One of the final touches I added before releasing it was to make sure all SID rows were disabled until one or more YouTube videos were present. This instantly spawned a dark ocean of silent SID rows everywhere. Time to start adding YouTube videos. I eagerly flexed my fingers – and then it dawned upon me.

There are tens of thousands of SID rows, and I have to add this manually. 🙄

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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A question I’ve been asked from time to time about my web site DeepSID is how the SID composers in the MUSICIANS folders have been divided according to the quality of their songs.

All of the composer folders in each letter folder inside MUSICIANS have received a rating from 1-5 stars. I then decided that a certain amount of stars, say 3, determines that the composer is at least okay, maybe even good. If the rating is 4 or more, it’s a great composer.

This was done because I needed this division for at least three features of DeepSID:

  • The list of recommendations, available from a link in the top line.
  • The “All”, “Decent” and “Good” sort options for every MUSICIANS letter folder.
  • Jumping to a random composer of a decent quality from the front page.

I knew that judging the composers to fit these three features would be a sensitive area. Even a minefield. I thought for a while about how I wanted to proceed doing this. I really wanted to involve a lot of people, but there were complications. Let’s go through each of these.

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SID: Children

Here’s a cover of Childish Games by Lstn. Most of it was made in CheeseCutter in June 2019 as an extension to a filter chord test. I tweaked it a little bit before releasing it for the 2020 Quarantine Emotional Music Compo at CSDb. I later had to retract it as the competition doesn’t allow covers.

Here’s the DeepSID entry if you want to listen to the SID file itself.

Here’s a YouTube video recorded on real C64 hardware:

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SID: Tyne

Here’s the SID tune I made for the teaser of Vandalism News #70.

The intro tune was composed in CheeseCutter in March 2018. It was something I came up with on my Korg M1 in the beginning of the 90’s. It’s easy to play, even for a keyboard klutz like me.

Here’s the DeepSID entry if you want to listen to the SID file itself.

Here’s a YouTube video recorded on real C64 hardware: