The first of three short tunes made for Crack Intro Music Competition 2022 at CSDb.
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.
Tag: SID
You Do Not Talk About SID Club
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Having been part of the big demo scene on the Commodore 64 in the 80’s, coding a popular music editor and making music on it, I’ve been entangled in this hobby for years before taking a break for decades and then returning to make both more music as well as a web site to play SID music.
Craving to keep myself updated on this very specific hobby, I’ve been scouring through lots of web sites, editors, players and social media every day to find interesting news, and some of this has even been used to good effect at my site. At one point I even considered adding a WordPress blog to this site with SID news presented as blog posts – and maybe even allow guest posts for other SID aficionados to write.
But as the years went by since my comeback, I have been repeatedly disappointed by the lack of buzz going on in this area. Considering how many really skilled composers there are hacking away at the SID chip these days, it’s astounding how little they actually talk about it.
In fact, it’s a tendency that eventually caused me to kill my WordPress plans entirely.
SID: Rising Planet
A long SID tune made for the music competition at Gubbdata 2022.
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.
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.
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. 🙄
SID: Down
A sad SID loop that I later decided should contribute in the Ringtone Music Compo at CSDb.
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.
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.
SID: Haploid
A short medieval SID loop made for Like It’s ’83 Music Compo 2021 where it is supposed to sound like it was made in 1983. For that reason it was crudely made on purpose – no hard restart, etc.
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.
SID: Awry
This is a 20-seconds SID loop I originally intended to expand upon, but later I just used it in the 2020 Short Music and SFX Loop Competition at CSDb. Do you think I should make a longer version out of it?
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.
SID: Gentofte
This is a small loop I composed in my mind one day I was walking down past a brook towards my mother’s house. It was later released for the 2020 Short Music and SFX Loop Competition at CSDb.
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:
Posted retroactively in December 2023.