SIDPlayer
A SID tune replayer

License

SIDPlayer is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. See the file "COPYING" that is included in the distribution for details.

What is SIDPlayer?

SIDPlayer is a replayer program for C64 music ("SID tunes"), like PlaySID on the Amiga or SIDPLAY for Unix. You can think of it as being a stripped-down C64 emulator that only emulates the CPU and the sound chip of the C64. SIDPlayer can replay SID tunes in the "PSID" file format, but it cannot run any C64 programs.

Why would I want to listen to C64 music?

The C64 had the most advanced sound capabilities of all home computers in the early 80's. While other computers of that time were only able to produce beeps, the C64 had a complete 3-voice analog synthesizer on its MOS 6581 sound chip (called "SID" - "Sound Interface Device"). Even some more modern computers (as the Atari ST or the first Macs) had worse sound.

The SID chip features three oscillators with selectable waveform, ADSR envelope generators, programmable resonance filters and special effects like ring modulation. With the aid of the CPU, it can also replay 4-bit sampled sounds. SIDPlayer emulates all features of the SID chip, including the filters.

There were (and are still) many composers programming excellent music for the C64 and thousands of tunes have been converted for use with SID tune replayers on nearly every existing computer platform. One big advantage of SID tunes is that they take very little hard disk space: most are only 4-8K in size.

System Requirements

SIDPlayer runs on all Unix systems supported by SDL (which includes Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Irix) and on BeOS R4.5 or later versions.

Successfully tested systems include:

Linux/i386
BeOS/x86 R5
BeOS/ppc R5

Supported file formats

The only SID tune file format supported by SIDPlayer is single-file PSID files (these have the signature "PSID" in the first 4 bytes). Most SID music available on the Internet is in this format.

Installing SIDPlayer

See the file "INSTALL".

Using SIDPlayer under BeOS

SIDPlayer can be started from the Tracker or from the Shell. If you give the name of a PSID file as an argument from the Shell or drag a PSID file onto the SIDPlayer icon from the Tracker, that file is loaded and played.

The SIDPlayer window displays some information about the currently loaded PSID file and has the usual tapedeck-like controls for pausing, restarting and stopping the replay and for selecting the next or previous song contained in the PSID file. The number of the song currently playing and the total number of songs in the loaded PSID file are displayed to the right of the tapedeck buttons. The slider in the bottom right of the window can be used to adjust the replay speed.

The SIDPlayer menu has three items:

"About SIDPlayer" shows some information about SIDPlayer
"Sound Control" opens the sound control window (see below)
"Quit" quits SIDPlayer

To load another PSID file, drag it into the SIDPlayer window. To quit SIDPlayer, close the window or select the "Quit" menu item.

Some functions of SIDPlayer can also be controlled with the keyboard:

  P          : Play/pause
  S          : Stop
  N          : Next song

Esc/Space : Stop
Left arrow : Previous song
Right arrow: Next song
Q : Quit

Using SIDPlayer under Unix

SIDPlayer currently only works as a command line application. It is invoked as follows:

sidplayer FILE [song_number]

"FILE" is the name of the PSID file to be loaded. The optional "song_number" specifies the number of the song to be player (instead of the default song). SIDPlayer cannot detect when a song has finished, so you have to use Ctrl-C to quit it.

SIDPlayer accepts a number of command line arguments. Type "sidplayer --help" to get a list.

If you have a Catweasel MK3 PCI card with a SID chip installed you can redirect the output of SIDPlayer to the card by specifying the "--cwsid on" command line argument. Visit www.jschoenfeld.de for more information about the Catweasel card.

The Sound Control window (BeOS only)

Sound post-processing is controlled with the "Effect" pop-up menu and the "Delay" and "Feedback" sliders. The available effects are "None" (no postprocessing), "Reverb" (simple reverb) and "Spatial" (reverb with phase shift, intended for headphone users).

The checkbox labeled "Filters" is used to turn the emulation of the SID filters on or off.

The "New SID Chip" checkbox selects the type of SID chip to be emulated. Currently this only affects some combined waveforms.

The eight slider gadgets in the right part of the window control the stereo panning and volume of each of the four voices (3 synthesized voices, 1 sampled voice).

Where do I get PSID files

The two largest collections of SID tunes are the "High Voltage" SID Collection (http://hvsc.c64.org) and the "NemeSIDs" archive (ftp://frodo.hiof.no/pub/c64/sidmusic). These have been used for testing during the development of SIDPlayer and they should all work.

Twenty demonstration SID tunes are included with SIDPlayer in the "PSID Demo" directory.

Support

Updates of SIDPlayer are available on the official SIDPlayer home page:

http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/SPMain.html

History

V1.0 - First release
V2.0 - SID filter emulation, better envelope generation V2.1 - Implemented notch filter, 60Hz replay now works, added faster/

slower buttons, compiled for BeOS DR8 V2.2 - Improved the 6510, triangle waveform is now 12 bits, output

       clipping, stereo output, corrected SID sustain behaviour,
       reading from a write-only SID register returns the last byte
       written to the SID, combined waveforms sampled from a 6581R4
V2.3 - Corrected BRK, DCP, ARR and LAS instructions, volume levels up
       to 200% possible, compiled for BeOS DR9

V2.4 - Shows name/author/copyright in ISO-Latin1 V2.5 - Converted panning/volume sliders to BSlider class V3.0 - Unified PPC/x86 release
V4.0 - Now based on Frodo V5 CPU/SID code (more efficient CPU emulation,

       post-processing effects (reverb, spatial), prefs manager), replaced
       faster/slower buttons by slider, added popup menu and sound control
       window, ported to BeOS R5 with new Media Kit, implemented CIA timer
       speed control, and SIDPlayer can now also be used as a CL-Amp plugin
V4.1 - Runs as a command line application under Unix (requiring SDL),
       preferences items can be passed on the command line, and SIDPlayer
       can now also be used as a SoundPlay plugin
V4.2 - Fixed writes to mirrored SID registers, output to WAV file is possible
       in SDL version
V4.3 - Added support for Catweasel SID hardware in SDL version (use option
       "--cwsid on"), CIA timer speed control now actually works
V4.4 - Fixed a problem with the wrong replay routine being called when the
       IRQ vector was changed. Mastercomposer tunes (and probably others)
       not play correctly. [Thanks to Stefano Tognon.]

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Claes Löfqvist and Marco Nelissen for their help with adding CL-Amp and SoundPlay plugin support.

Christian Bauer
<Christian.Bauer@uni-mainz.de>